How to block scripted.com referral traffic in Google Analytics
Scripted.com is one of the latest referrer spam URLs used to target your website’s referral traffic with deceptive and useless data. If you notice scripted.com referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics data you will see that the spam URL will make it appear like a visitor was referred from a page on the website that may reference your website such as scripted.com/example.com or scripted.com/botcrawl.com. However, scripted.com referral traffic does not actually land on your website. This type of referral traffic is known as ghost traffic and it is not essentially dangerous but it can ruin your website’s appropriate data and be quite a continuous nuisance. *Scripted.com claims that another entity is responsible for using their domain name.
Scripted.com referrer spam and referrer spam in general from other URLs such as googlemare.com is a big problem for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone responsible for monitoring analytical data. Scripted.com referrer spam can ruin your data measured by Google Analytics and fill it with spam content. The Google Analytics data that scripted.com referral traffic can ruin includes everything included in Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports. For example, scripted.com referral traffic typically “lands” on a single webpage and leaves your website from the single webpage (even though it never actually “lands” on your website due to being phantom traffic). This can create an inflated bounce rate. Furthermore, scripted.com spam can appear from different global locations and sources which can interfere with Audience reports.
If you notice scripted.com referral traffic in Google Analytics do not be alarmed. Ghost traffic cannot ruin your website, it cannot damage your website’s rank in search results, and it will not use up your bandwidth like bots and spiders do. Ghost traffic from the spam URL can simply ruin your website’s data provided by Google Analytics. It targets you based off of your analytics ID and tracking number.
If you notice scripted.com referral traffic mixed into your website’s Google Analytics data we recommend to block scripted.com using a simple exclude filter and take advantage of the exclude all hits from known bots and spiders feature in Google Analytics.
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What is scripted.com?
Scripted.com is one of the latest referrer spam URLs used to target your website’s referral traffic with deceptive and useless data. If you notice scripted.com referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics data you will see that the spam URL will make it appear like a visitor was referred from a page on the website that may reference your website such as scripted.com/example.com or scripted.com/botcrawl.com. This is actually a new tactic used by referrer spammers. *Scripted.com claims that they are not responsible for this referrer spam and that another entity is the one who used bots to spam their domain name around the web.
Scripted.com promotes overpriced content writing services for blogs, papers, tweets, Facebook posts, products, articles, and more. However, you should not trust the spam website and their services. Referrer spam websites have absolutely no regard for your website and your appropriate data. They set out to ruin your data in order to advertise to you. They could care less how much it annoys you and how destructive it is as long as it helps them advertise to you.
The downside to unwanted scripted.com referral traffic for website owners is that it can ruin the appropriate Google Analytics data. In some cases, referrer spam 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.
Scripted.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 block scripted.com referral traffic in Google Analytics
This guide will help you stop unwanted scripted.com referral traffic and stop scripted.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 Scripted.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 scripted.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. If you want to add more URLs to the same filter create a Filter Pattern like this: scripted.com | example.com | example.com
