Domain-tracker.com is one of the newest referrer spam URLs used to spam your Google Analytics data with fraudulent referral traffic. Domain-tracker.com referral traffic is designed to make it appear as if someone was referred to your website from domain-tracker.com in order to persuade you to visit the url. The domain-tracker.com URL currently forwards to multiple web hosting websites including ipage.com, greengeeks.com, webhostinghub.com, and siteground.com.
Domain-tracker.com referral spam is not associated with the mentioned websites that it forwards to. Instead, this appears to be a third-party entity taking advantage of the affiliate programs for the hosting websites. If caught, the web hosting companies will likely suspend the used account without payment. This is similar to what happened with other webpages including snip.tw and syfonix.com.
Domain-tracker.com referral traffic does not actually land on your website. It is a type of website traffic known as ghost traffic that only targets your Google Analytics reports with fraudulent data. Domain-tracker.com referral traffic may also appear land on your website at a nonexistent path such as: /?from=http://domain-tracker.com/ and other locations.
The good thing is that domain-tracker.com referral traffic cannot harm your website or your website’s rank in Google search results pages. However, it can ruin your website’s analytical data measured by Google Analytics. In some cases, referrer spam from bots and crawlers can use your bandwidth and create backlinks in your website’s access logs, but this is not the case with domain-tracker.com referral traffic since it utilizes ghost traffic to create faux data in your analytical reports.
Domain-tracker.com referral traffic can be a bad thing for people who value their website’s appropriate data. If value your website’s ‘real’ data you will want to block domain-tracker.com referral spam from mixing into your website’s analytical data before it gets out-of-control. For example, the domain-tracker.com referral typically “lands” on a single webpage on your website and leave your website from the same webpage. This creates a 100% bounce rate and if this happens multiple times per day it can be catastrophic for your real bounce rate. This is not the only data affected by domain-tracker.com referral spam. Data that this domain name and referrer spam from other spam URLs such as website-analyzer.info can affect includes pretty much every detail measured in Google Analytics Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions reports.
Domain-tracker.com referrer spammers and referrer spammers in general target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Referrer spammers want to promote a website and want you to visit the webpage or search for it online through Google search engine results pages.
- Referrer spammers want to boost their rank on Google search engine results pages by creating backlinks. They do this by logging requests into your website’s access log, which is then crawled by Google’s indexing bots and seen as a backlink to the spam site.
Block domain-tracker.com referral traffic in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to block domain-tracker.com referrals in Google Analytics with a filter that stops domain-tracker.com referrer spam at the campaign source.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.
2. Click the ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add domain-tracker.com or something you can easily remember as the Filter Name.
4. Select the Custom Filter Type.
5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add domain-tracker.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add multiple URLs to the same filter you can make a Filter Pattern similar to this with a | between each URL: example.com | domain-tracker.com
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
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