Semalt Expert Explains How To Block Darodar In Nginx
Darodar is a famous referral spammer that clogs up the Google Analytics accounts of both small and large sized websites with malicious and low-quality traffic. Unfortunately, Google Analytics cannot filter it out properly, and your site's search engine ranking decreases in no time. Some miffed webmasters and bloggers have talked about Darodar activities, providing details about how to block it. Even a few WordPress plugins have been introduced to eliminate the Darodar traffic, but here is an easy and outstanding way of preventing it in nginx.
With this method provided by a top expert of Semalt, Julia Vashneva, you can get a tiny bit of revenge from the spammers.
What should you block?
The first thing is to identify who you want to block. In your Google Analytics account, you can set up new parameters and check the quality of your traffic. You have to make sure that you eliminate the visits with a low session duration and 100% bounce rate. Sadly, botnets like Darodar.com are difficult to deal with as their bots and spiders are present everywhere on the internet.
You need to get the list of sites that are possibly receiving fake traffic. It is not so easy especially when you have a large number of websites. Prepare the list with names of sites receiving referral spam, and decide which ones you should block. The main culprits we have found that you should include in your list are buttons-for-website.com, darodar.com, hulfingtonpost.com, priceg.com, ilovevitaly.co, forum20.smailik.org, blackhatworth.com, and o-o-6-o-o.com. You should block all of these websites to protect your Google Analytics reports.
Send them out
You should bear in mind that Darodar.com will never respect your Google Analytics account and don't obey robots.txt. That is why you should redirect their spiders and bots back to their own website and mess with their Google Analytics account by implementing special codes. Alternatively, you can use URL shortening services (shadyurl.com) for redirecting them back through random URLs, confusing their Google Analytics to a great extent.
Honestly speaking, they might not have been originated from the developers and makers of Darodar, but you should redirect their traffic to protect your own website on the internet. Given the unapologetic attitude on Facebook and Twitter, you should not feel bad or guilty. It is possible to set up individual statements for all of the referrers, ensuring your protection in search engine results.
Test everything properly
Last but not the least, you should test everything properly. Since you have messed with the nginx config files, it is good to test whether you have blocked what you wanted to block or not. It is important to not create false matches. Instead, you should focus on blocking Darodar in your Google Analytics account.
Once you have set up the redirects and errors, you should use the Server Status tool for checking the responses of the server for multiple referral strings. If you have any other idea in your mind and want to share with us, do not forget to throw us an email or comment in the box below.