Well, apparently there is a new referrer spammer out there, called 4Webmasters.org that has started showing up in Google Analytics as a referral source. If you suddenly see an increase in traffic on your site, check to see which sites are the referral sources. Hopefully the source of new traffic to your site is something positive, like better search engine rankings. But, it might actually be referrer spam. I noticed that 4Webmasters.org just started a lot of referral spam in the past few days, as I’m seeing it in the Google Analytics accounts of several different sites.
Your traffic could look like this:
If it looks like that in Google Analytics, first go to the Acquisition section and then click on “Source/Medium” in Google Analytics. There is a list of referral sources (the sites that referred traffic to you or the sites that people clicked on to get to your site). If you see 4Wwebmasters.org then that is FAKED, SPAM traffic. They want to you check out their site, which is a “rank tracking” type of software. They have some sort of bot that is going to your site making you think that there were a lot of visitors from their site to your site. But there isn’t. That’s how they “advertise” their service. Pretty shady, if you ask me. And it’s just flat-out wrong.
If you see this, then you need to filter out that traffic so that it doesn’t show up in your Google Analytics reports anymore. Here is how to filter referrer spam sites that you are seeing in Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics, at the top you’ll see “Admin”. If you have the correct type of access to Google Analytics (you are an admin level) then select the right account and property. In this case below I’m choosing my billhartzer.com site. Then click on Filters:
Once you select Filters, then you can set up a new filter, like this:
Make sure you save the filter and you might want to test it (you can verify to make sure that the filter is set up correctly).
That’s it! If you see any other referral spam sites or sites you would like to exclude, you can add more filters.
