1 Method: Create an Exclude Filter
Unusual addons.mozilla.org referral traffic in your Google Analytics data is spam. If you notice addons.mozilla.org referral traffic mixed in your Google Analytics data it means that your account was targeted by a referrer spammer and online visitors were not actually referred to your website from addons.mozilla.org.
A Russian spammer has recently been spamming several legitimate websites including abc.xyz and thenextweb.com throughout Google Analytics accounts across the world. The reason why the spammer is currently spamming your Google Analytics with this domain is to get your attention and persuade you to visit the webpage. The webpage promotes an add-on for Mozilla Firefox named Google Killer.
Sample
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ilovevitaly/ Google Killer search shell what makes google search non-greedy and lucky, saves your time on viewing ads and gives you a lot of search shortcuts for different search engines, torrents, shops, maps, travel, booking and many other useful services.
The Russian spammer has been in the referrer spam game for a long time. The spammer will utilize various tactics in order to make it look like your website received referral traffic from addons.mozilla.org even though it did not. The referral traffic that appears in your Google Analytics reports did not actually land on your website. It’s a specific type of web traffic that is known as “ghost traffic.” This type of web traffic sends phantom visitors to your website’s data in order to make it appear as if someone visited your website from the referral URL.
Referrer spammers usually target your website’s data 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.
Addons.mozilla.org Google Analytics referrer spam can actually ruin your website’s analytical data measured by Google Analytics. It can affect most of the data in your reports with fake web traffic and data. For example, the referrals will appear to land on a single webpage on your website and leave from the same website, which will create a 100% bounce rate. If your website is targeted by referrer spammers you may not be able to identify your website’s bounce rate. The same can be said about other data measured in most Google Analytics reports.
Some might say that blocking a legitimate website is a “bad practice.” But, if you care about your analytical data you will want to block as much spam as you can.
Create an Exclude Filter
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab> Click Filters on the right side in the VIEW section.
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add Addons.mozilla.org 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 Addons.mozilla.org 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 | Example\.com | Addons.mozilla.org
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
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