Block social-widget.xyz referral spam in Google Analytics
Block social-widget.xyz referral spam in Google Analytics
Social-widget.xyz is a referrer spam domain name we discovered that is used to spam your Google Analytics data with deceptive and fraudulent referral traffic in order to promote sharebutton.to; a website notorious for utilizing the blackhat SEO referrer spam tactic. Referral traffic from social-widget.xyz does not actually land on your website. It is a type of web traffic known as ghost traffic that only targets your website’s Google Analytics data. Social-widget.xyz referral traffic may also appear land on your website at a nonexistent path such as: /?from=http://social-widget.xyz/.
This referrer spam cannot harm your website or your website’s rank in Google search results pages but it can ruin your website’s analytical data measured by Google Analytics. In some cases referrer spam and traffic from bots and crawlers can use your bandwidth and create backlinks in your website’s access logs; However, this is not the case with social-widget.xyz referral traffic since it utilizes ghost traffic.
Social-widget.xyz referrals in your Google Analytics data can be a bad thing if you value your website’s appropriate data. If value your website’s appropriate data you will want to block social-widget.xyz referral spam from mixing into your website’s analytical data before it gets out-of-hand. Referrer spam in general can ruin data with deceptive referral traffic. For example, the social-widget.xyz referral typically “lands” on a single webpage on your website and leave your website from the same webpage. This creates a 100% bounce rate and if this happens multiple times per day it can be catastrophic for your real bounce rate. This is not the only data affected by social-widget.xyz referral spam. Data that this domain name and referrer spam from other spam URLs such as website-analyzer.info can affect includes pretty much every detail measured in Google Analytics Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions reports.
Quick Links
Social-widget.xyz is one of the latest referrer spam domain names used to spam your Google Analytics data with deceptive and fraudulent referral traffic in order to promote the sharebutton.to website. This website contains buttons on your website, but we suggest to avoid using these buttons since they will add links to known spam websites on your website.
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.
This guide shows you how to block social-widget.xyz referrals in Google Analytics with a filter that stops social-widget.xyz referrer spam 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 social-widget.xyz 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 social-widget.xyz 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 | social-widget.xyz | sharebutton.to
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
