Block Siteground.com Referral in Google Analytics
Unusual referral traffic from siteground.com is not a bad thing. If you notice siteground.com referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics data do not be alarmed. A third-party has recently been spamming several legitimate web hosting websites across the globe including hostgator.com and others. The reason for the spam is currently unknown and assumed not to be linked to the associated parties. HostGator and Siteground are two companies who are already reputable and they do not need to referrer spam Google Analytics data in order to get attention at the expense of others.
Even though siteground.com referral traffic is harmless and not malicious referrer spam can actually ruin your website’s analytical data measured in Google Analytics reports. Spammers target your Google Analytics data with fake referral traffic and data in order to persuade you to visit the websites they spam. For some reason someone is spamming siteground.com to possibly harm the reputation of the business. Siteground.com referral traffic does not actually land on your website though. It is a type of traffic called ghost traffic that simply sets aim at your Google Analytics account and random websites across the world.
The fake siteground.com referral traffic and associated data will ruin things your like bounce rate and other data measured in Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion reports. It can negatively affect your bounce rate because the spam URL will appear to land on a single webpage on your website and leave your website from the same webpage, thus creating a 100% rate. If this occurs numerous times each day your bounce rate can be very high and you will not be able to identify your website’s real bounce rate due to the spam.
Siteground.com referral traffic and unwanted referral traffic from “real” referrer spam URLs are usually harmless to your website. They will not affect your page rank or your position in Google Search Results Pages. However, in some cases bots and crawlers are used to spam your data and this type of referrer spam will actually land on your website as opposed to ghost traffic. If this happens your bandwidth can be used and the spam URLs will create backlinks off your website’s access logs.
Referrer spammers in general 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.
Block siteground.com referral traffic in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to block siteground.com referrals in Google Analytics with a filter that stops siteground.com referrer spam at the campaign 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 siteground.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 siteground.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 | siteground.com
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
