How to block erot.co referral traffic (Referrer Spam)

Many webmasters, website owners, bloggers, and search engine marketers have been complaining about erot.co referral traffic in their Analytics. Unwanted referral traffic from erot.co can ruin your Google Analytics data, including the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior analytical data sections. For example, erot.co referral traffic can ruin the bounce rate, geography information, and basically everything else found in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior sections. The bounce rate is affected by erot.co referrer spam because the spam URL only lands on a single webpage and leaves from the same webpage.

The guide on this page will help you block erot.co referral traffic in Google Analytics and block erot.co referrer spam using your website’s .htaccess file in order to stop receiving unwanted referral traffic from erot.co.

What is erot.co?

Erot.co is a pornography (erotic) website that willingly engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Erot.co referrer spam is designed to create repeated site requests onto your website at any given time and from any location using traffic bots and other blackhat SEO tactics. The benefits that spammers have by engaging in referrer spamming is that it will help them advertise the website they want people to visit and it will improve the spammers search engine ranking by creating backlinks to their website off your website’s access log. The downside is that referrals from erot.co can interfere with your Google Analytics data and other metrics, as well as use a website’s bandwidth by creating repeat site requests and make it look like your website is linked to pornography.

Referrer spam is a very questionable tactic used to promote online content. Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:

• Spammers want to promote a webpage and want you to visit the webpage or search for it online – and visit it through Google search engine results pages.
• 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 and seen as a backlink to the spam site.

erot.co referrer spam is not entirely dangerous to your website. It will most likely not cause any trouble with how your website is accessed by your visitors or ranked by Google. However, in some cases erot.co spam may use up your website’s bandwidth and CPU by creating multiple site requests to your website. In other cases, the spam URL is served to your analytical data by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website.

1. How to block erot.co referral traffic in Google Analytics

To stop erot.co referrer spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking erot.co referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter will only mask the spam URL. To block the referrer spam URL at the sources please see the instructions below to block erot.co referrer spam using your website’s .htaccess file.

1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.

2. Click the New Filter button to create a new filter.

3. Add erot.co 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 erot.co and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.

2. How to block erot.co referral traffic using your .htaccess file

To block erot.co referrer spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.

## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} erot.co [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} erot.co
RewriteRule .* - [F]

• Also see: How to block referrer spam