How to stop free-social-buttons.com and free-share-buttons.com?

First you need to know that trying to block these referrals from the .htaccess file won’t work because they never access your site.

To stop Ghost Spam, you must create a filter in Google Analytics. For a quick fix, I’ll show you how to add a filter for free-social-buttons, but after you do it I strongly recommend following this guide to apply a Valid Hostname Filter. This won’t only stop the referral spam, but it will also prevent the fake direct visits that comes with it.

Note: if you have previous spam filters you can add the referral to the end like
guardlink.org|free-social-buttons.com
You can keep adding referrals to the same filter until you reach 255 characters, after that you will have to create a new filter.

To create quick exclude filter follow these steps:

1 In your Google Analytics, go to the Admin tab.

2 Under the View Column select Filters GA filters

3 Select New Filter GA New filter

4 Put Referral Spam as a name for the Filter.

5 Select Filter Type Custom. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source. In the Filter Pattern text box, copy and paste the next expression

floating-share-buttons.com|social-buttons.com|simple-share-buttons.com|free-share-buttons.com|free-social-buttons.com

After you set everything Save

If you use the filter verification tool you can actually see the filter working. It will show you the data before and after applying the filter.

Note: This tool takes a sample of data of 7 days so if in those days there is no appearance of the Spam the verification won’t work. The filter will work anyway.

This filter will take care of all subdomains of any of the forms as well, as you can see in the next image.

Take into consideration that It may take up to 24 hours before filter effects start working as Google says here.

As I mention before this is a quick fix against the referrals, but it won’t stop the fake direct visits. After you apply it, I strongly recommend following this guide to apply a Valid Hostname Filter, this will prevent any future hit of ghost spam whether it shows as a referral, keyword, page or direct visit.

How to clean your historical data?

The filter will stop future occurrences of the referral. Unfortunately, there is no way to delete this records but you can use Segments to remove the spam from historical data.

1 Go to the Reporting section in your Google Analytics.

2 In the lateral bar, expand Acquisitions > All Traffic and Select Referrals.

3 In the main board Click on +Add Segment.

4 Click on New Segment.

5 Select Conditions Below Advanced.

6 Set filter as Exclude. Change Ad Content for Medium and contains for exactly matches and type and select referral in the text box.

7 Click on AND

8 Change Ad Content for Source and contains for matches regex and paste this expression(same as the filter)
floating-share-buttons.com|social-buttons.com|simple-share-buttons.com|free-share-buttons.com|free-social-buttons.com

The graph on the right will adjust the percentage depending on how many data of the Referrer Spam removes.