Block instatheme.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
Instatheme.com is a website that has alleged affiliates who engage in a blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam. Instatheme.com referrer spam is designed to essentially hit your Google Analytics data with deceptive and fraudulent referral traffic from a variety of domain names and URLs like snip.tw and site5264824.snip.tw. This type of spam is designed to get your attention and provoke you to investigate the provocative web addresses which ultimately forward to instatheme.com.
Referral traffic from this domains that forward to instatheme.com do not actually land on your website. It is a type of web traffic known as ghost traffic that instead sets aim at your Google Analytics account and your website’s data. Instatheme.com referrer spam attacks your website’s analytical data in order to aggressively promote the website with no regards for you and your website’s data.
Referrals from instatheme.com in your Google Analytics data can be a bad thing. If you are someone who values your website’s appropriate data you will want to block instatheme.com spam from messing-up your website’s analytical data. Referrer spam in general can ruin data with deceptive referral traffic. For example, instatheme.com referrals normally “land” on a single webpage on your website and leave your website from the same page. This creates a 100% bounce rate and if this happens multiple times each day you may lose touch with your real bounce rate. This is not the only data affected by deceptive instatheme.com referral traffic. Data that can be affected by referrer spam includes pretty much every detail measured in Google Analytics Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions reports.
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What is instatheme.com?
Instatheme.com is a website that engages in a blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam. Different spam URLs spam your data and will forward to instatheme.com when you visit them. This website is used to promote a specific web theme.
Referrer spam is a desperate an unethical blackhat SEO tactic that has no regard for your website and your website’s data. Because of this it is recommended to avoid services and products promoted by referrer spammers.
Referrer 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.
How to block instatheme.com referrer spam
This guide shows you how to block instatheme.com referrer spam and URLs that forward to it in Google Analytics by creating a simple exclude filter that stops instatheme.com referrals at the 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 Instatheme.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 the URL like “snip.tw” that forwards to instatheme.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 | instatheme.com | snip.tw
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
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