Referral spams, the pros and cons in light of ‘Vote for trump’.

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In Analytics Corner
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Few weeks before the 56th US presidential election took place, Google registered complaints from Web marketers about this spam link they observed in their analytics data which said,

“secret.google.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!”

This message was popping up in Analytics data of webmasters accounts all over the world, bumbled up all the analytics data.

‘Wanna piss off someone, mess up their webmaster analytics SEO report data’, i don’t know about you but it seems this spammer has pissed off many with one master stroke, including Google and US president Donald Trump.

Coming back to the massive spam, What is secret.Google.com ?

secret-google-com-vote-trump-spam-search-volumeWell everyone tried to unveil the veil and so did we, but it looks like sherlock holmes got fooled this time. ‘Secret.google.com’ when we tried to find out, it came out this URL doesn’t exist. It wasn’t harmful nor it made us vulnerable to any virus or any other potential web danger, looked like someone was spoofing. However,  it’s considered wise to pay no heed to such links if they ever pop out in future.

Inspecting the recent trends used for promotion and traffic web traffic gaining, it’s hard to say who the culprit was. It could be Trumps team or Team Hillary, but now it’s over so who cares who it was.

The ponderous part is How it is bad for your website?.

At first it looks like someone is linking to your website and you will ignore this. Well! Who doesn’t want few visitors for their website, especially if it doesn’t charge you. But, when you get the knack of it you will try to evade it.

These is the reasons why?The traffic that you gain through these referrals pollutes your analytics data. Besides, there are couple of badass spammers who install a special script in your website.

Thanks to searchify for uploading the list of spam links, You can always check from the list if you’re invaded by a spammer.

Now, turn for the question the world wants to know ‘How to get rid of such spams?’.

Sorry to disappoint, but you can’t help it. Once these spams links get in your analytics data, there’s no way out for them. Oh!! Don’t be sad, there’s still a way to help yourself.

It’s true you can’t remove them once they get in, but you can NO ENTRY for the next one and filter this one.

Here are the steps by searchify to effectively block referral spam, do the following in Google Analytics:

  1. Go to ADMIN > All Filters
  2. Click on “ADD FILTER”
  3. Give the filter a name (e.g. “include host only”)
  4. Click on Filter Type “Custom”
  5. Click “Include”
  6. Click “Select Field” and select “Hostname”
  7. Under “Filter Pattern”, add the domain name of your website (e.g. “searchify.ca”)
  8. Apply the filter to any of your profiles.

Now, how to remove referral spams from analytics report. Here are the steps from an article by searchify to help you out.

To remove referral spam from reports, add a similar filter to the reports. In the case of the Donald Trump referral spam, do the following to filter the referrer spam out of any Analytics report or Data View:

  1. Create a new Report or Segment
  2. Click on “Traffic Sources”
  3. Under “Source”, type the domain of the spammer you’d like to exclude (e.g. “webmonetizer.net”
  4. If you have multiple spammers, choose “matches RegEx” and add a list of spammer domains, separated by a pipe sign and with a backslash before the dot (e.g. “webmonetizer\.net|wmasterlead\.com”. Feel free to omit the top domain levels (e.g. “.com” or “.ru”) altogether.
  5. Save your report or segment.
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