The reputation of several of the most well known web hosting providers in the world is currently under attack by referrer spammers. For the past few days referrer spammers have been spamming the domain names of popular web hosts into third-party Google Analytics reports. If your Google Analytics account is under attack by the spammers you will notice an increase in unusual referral traffic from websites like godaddy.com, hostgator.com, and many more. The culprit of the referrer spam is someone linked to the two domains hosting-tracker.com and domain-tracker.com. You might also notice referral traffic from these domains in your Google Analytics reports.
Do not be alarmed if you notice unusual godaddy.com referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics reports. It is happening to a lot of people. Just because you see godaddy.com referral traffic in your reports does not mean that someone actually visited your website from godaddy.com or that GoDaddy has anything to do with the happening. In fact, no one actually visited your website or landed on your website at all from godaddy.com. The popular web hosting websites are being spammed in the form of ghost traffic. Ghost traffic does not actually land on your website. It simply targets Google Analytics accounts at random and fills them with useless and deceptive data.
A third-party is spamming godaddy.com referral traffic into Google Analytics reports in order to hurt their reputation. People who monitor Google Analytics reports may notice godaddy.com referral traffic and become upset about it and expect it to be referrer spam. However, a well-known company like GoDaddy does not need to spam their website at the expense of themselves and others in order to generate potential customers.
Referrer spam is usually a blackhat SEO tactic reserved for desperate and malicious websites, programs, and services. Never before has a legitimate company knowingly participated in referrer spamming. Blackhat SEO companies like Semalt.com, shady advertising companies like Propellerads.com, and others are the ones who usually referrer spam various URLs. They may even use other URLS that forward to their main websites or a landing page on their websites.
Referrer spam is essentially harmless to your website but it can ruin your real Google Analytics data. For example, it can negatively affect your bounce rate because the spam URL will appear to land on a single webpage on your website and leave your website from the same webpage. This will create a 100% rate and if this occurs numerous times each day your bounce rate can be very high.
Godaddy.com referral traffic does not actually land on your website. It is a type of traffic called ghost traffic that simply sets aim at your Google Analytics account and random websites across the world.
How to block Godaddy.com referral in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to block Godaddy.com referrals in Google Analytics by creating a filter that stops excludes Godaddy.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 Godaddy.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 godaddy.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 | godaddy.com
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
Leave a Comment