Block Hostgator.com Referral in Google Analytics

Hostgator.com is a legitimate web hosting provider. However, recently a third-party has taken advantage of the hosting provider and is spamming the hostgator.com domain name into Google Analytics reports across the world. It is a tactic known as referrer spam. This tactic is usually used to promote a website the spammers desperately want people to visit, but this does not to appear the be the case with hostgator.com because it is already an established company. If you see an unusual amount of hostgator.com referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics data it means that your Google Analytics account has randomly been targeted by spammers.

The good thing is that hostgator.com referral traffic cannot harm your website or your website’s rank in Google search results pages. However, 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 hostgator.com referral traffic since it utilizes ghost traffic to create faux data in your analytical reports that never actually lands on your website.

Hostgator.com referral traffic can be a bad thing if you value your website’s appropriate and real data. If value your website’s data you will want to block hostgator.com referral spam from mixing into your website’s analytical data before it gets out-of-control. For example, the hostgator.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 hostgator.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.

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 hostgator.com referral traffic in Google Analytics

This guide shows you how to block hostgator.com referrals in Google Analytics with a filter that stops hostgator.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 hostgator.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 hostgator.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 | hostgator.com

Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)