Free-share-buttons.top is a malicious referrer spam URL that spams Google Analytics data with fraudulent information in order to gather a user’s attention and persuade them to visit the URL. Once the URL is visited the user will be directed through an ad-serving network to a website that promotes various programs and browser extensions. One advertisement promoted by this spam URL will direct users to a webpage that locks the browser in place and displays a full screen advertisement for the VKontakte Guests extension. The webpage basically forces users to download the extension in order to close the advertisement.
Free-share-buttons.top referral spam in Google Analytics can ruin a website’s data and make it difficult to monitor the proper metrics. The referrer spam URL usually spams a website’s referral traffic, active pages, landing pages, keywords, and other data data with a random string, or path, such as /www1.free-share-buttons.top.
The spam can make it appear as is someone landed on a webpage on a website at a path like example.com/www1.free-share-buttons.top. The spam can also make it seem as if someone was referred to a website from the URL.
What is free-share-buttons.top?
Free-share-buttons.top is a referrer spam URL similar to site-speed-checker.site and many others that we recently discovered. If you visit free-share-buttons.top in your browser you will be forwarded through an advertising network and onto a webpage that contains advertisements. Advertisements may promote rogue programs and malicious browser extensions.
If you notice free-share-buttons.top referrals in Google Analytics it does not mean that anyone was referred to your website from the URL. The referral traffic does not actually land on your website. It is a type of web traffic known as ghost traffic that creates phantom web hits in order to fool you into visiting it in your browser.
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.
Free-share-buttons.top referral spam in Google Analytics can be an issue for anyone who values their website’s real data. The referrals are used to mix fraudulent web traffic data into Google Analytics reports. Referrer spam from this and other spam websites can ruin your personal 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, free-share-buttons.top 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.
How to block free-share-buttons.top spam in Google Analytics
This guide explains how to block free-share-buttons.top spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that stops referrer spam at the campaign source. This is the method recommended by Google Analytics to block referrer spam and unwanted referral traffic, as well as other types of spam.
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 free-share-buttons.top 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 free-share-buttons.top 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 | free-share-buttons.top
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
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