Block googlemare.com referral spam in Google Analytics
Googlemare.com is one of the latest ilovevitaly.com referrer spam URLs that targets your Google Analytics data with fraudulent referral traffic. The googlemare.com domain name is used to forward to various webpages including a questionable browser add-on for Mozilla Firefox called Google Improver. If you notice googlemare.com referral traffic in Google Analytics do not be alarmed. Googlemare.com referrer spam is not essentially malicious; it will not affect your website’s rank or affect your bandwidth like bad bots and spiders do, but it can be a nuisance and ruin your website’s analytical data.
Googlemare.com referrer spam and referrer spam in general from other well known spam URLs like copyrightclaims.org have been a steady problem for webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data for a few years. Referrer spam can ruin website data measured by Google Analytics. The website data it can affect includes everything measured in Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports by Google Analytics. For example, googlemare.com referrer spam can mess up your bounce rate because the spam URL typically only lands on a single webpage on your website and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world, from various resources, and more.
Quick Links
What is Googlemare.com?
Googlemare.com is a referrer spam URL used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world. The URL forwards to an ilovevitaly.com associated webpage, including a mozilla.org webpage that contains the Google Improver add-on. According to the domain’s records there are multiple domains suspected to forward to the same website. The googlemare.com domain name is used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world.
The downside to unwanted Googlemare referral traffic for website owners is that it can ruin the appropriate Google Analytics data. In some cases it can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests. However, this is not the case with this URL since it primarily generates ghost hits that do not actually land on your website.
Spammers 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.
Googlemare.com referrer spam is not really 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 referrer spam that uses bad-bots and spiders 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, which happens to be the case with this URL. They often target your GA ID number.
How to stop Googlemare.com referral spam in Google Analytics
This guide will help you stop unwanted googlemare.com referral traffic and stop googlemare.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter.
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 Googlemare.com or the URL or something you can 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 googlemare.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
