title: Block traffic from referral spam bots in Azure Web App with DNN
body: <p>I am sure many of you have found fake referral traffic in your google analytics reports/views.  This makes it difficult for low to medium traffic sites to have accurate data for marketing.  I am wondering what others are doing to exclude this traffic from their analytics reports.</p>
  
  <p>If you go to your analytics account and go to acquisition -> all traffic -> referrals you will see sites like <em>floating-share-buttons.com</em>.  These are the sites I want to filter out.  Which you can do by setting up a custom filter for the view as described at the <a href="https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam" rel="nofollow">bottom of this page</a>.  I have done this and it works.</p>
  
  <p>I would rather block these bots from hitting the site all together. Just a note: my sites are running as web apps in azure.</p>
  
  <p>I am not sure if setting up url rewrite rules <a href="http://forums.iis.net/t/1225141.aspx?HTTP%20Referer%20blocking%20with%20URL%20rewrite" rel="nofollow">described here</a> will work in azure apps or if this will mess with the existing url rewrite functions of the Content Management System I am using (DotNetNuke DNN platform 7).</p>
  
  <p>I am really just looking to hear what others have done to block bots rather than than setting up filters in the analytics view's settings.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>
  
  <p>PS</p>
  
  <p>for those who are interested, this is the current filter list I am using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>webmonetizer\.net|trafficmonetizer\.org|success-seo\.com|event-tracking\.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now\.com|buttons-for-website\.com|4webmasters\.org|floating-share-buttons\.com|free-social-buttons\.com|e-buyeasy\.com
  </code></pre>