Google Analytics spam referrers not in Clicky!

I have a lot of spam referrers showing up in my GA reports, it drives me crazy!

But fortunately these spam referrers are not showing up in my Clicky reports. Now I have two questions:

- How does Clicky manage to block these spam referrers so successfully?

- I am thinking about deleting GA code from my websites because of the referrer spam. My bounce rate is very high in GA reports, and I wonder if that could have a negative effect on my search rankings?

- On the other side, would it be a disadvantage if I have no GA code on my websites, for my search rankings? Somehow I think that having a GA code on your website could be helping to get a higher ranking in the Google search engine? Anyone have any thoughts about that?

Thanks!

Most spam referrers are generated by bots, which we try very hard to detect. Google also claims to do that too but from what we've seen, they only do it based on user agent. We've developed a number of other proprietary methods to detect and block bots from logging fake traffic, I believe it's the best in the biz.

Google claims that GA data has no impact on search result rankings but it's hard to imagine that's true.

Removing the code should have no negative impact.

But we do recommend having at least two trackers on your site, in case one of them has issues, you have a backup to use until everything's better again. Obviously neither of them needs to be Google.

Thank you for your reply! Do you really think removing the GA code from a website will not affect the search rankings in Google? The greatest interest for Google is to know as much as possible what's happening on the internet, they want to collect as much data as possible.

So I don't know, I think (of course I can not prove it) Google will prefer to show websites with GA code installed higher in their search rankings.

Clicky says "removing the code should have no negative impact". Do you maybe have any experience or knowledge that you can share with us about this?

I don't think Google penalizes anyone for NOT having GA on their site. We've never had GA on our site for example but we rank between #1 and #5 in Google SERPs for every single search term we care about, pretty much always have. E.g. a search for super generic "web analytics", we're the 3rd result (4th if you count the wiki article, but 3rd in terms of "products").

However, I do believe they both penalize and/or boost the rankings of sites that DO have GA on them, based on e.g. bounce rate and average time on site data that Google has via GA. They would never admit and it can't be proven but it would be weird if they didn't do that.