This page explains what uptime-us.net is, why you might be seeing uptime-us.net referral traffic mixed in with your website’s Google Analytics data, and how to block referrer spam from the website in Google Analytics.
What is Uptime-us.net?
Uptime-us.net is a domain name that forwards to uptime.com. The uptime-us.net domain name is used to spam Google Analytics data with fake referral traffic in order to get web masters and website owners to punch in the web address and visit uptime.com.
Uptime.com is a website that contains various web services that essentially target website owners and web masters more than anyone else. The website utilizes the blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing in order to promote their services and generate potential customers at all costs.
Uptime-us.net employs various blackhat methods in order to make it appear as if someone was referred to your website from the URL. However, no visitor was actually referred to the website from the URL.
Website owners and people who monitor Google Analytics data will notice real-time and historical referral traffic from uptime-us.net. Most of the time the spam will make it appear as if someone was referred to your website multiple times in order to position the referral traffic data at the top of the accumulated list in your reports.
When a website owner or someone monitoring the data sees the fake referral traffic from uptime-us.net they might be suspicious as to why someone is visiting their website from uptime-us.net. The website uses this technique to trick people into searching for and visiting their website in order to obtain potential customers.
Although this sort of traffic might sound innocent, referrer spam can actually ruin your data and make it difficult to understand your website’s exact information. The traffic acquired from fake referrals can affect most of the data in your GA reports. For example, the fake referrals will appear to land on a single webpage on your website and leave from the same website and this will create a 100% bounce rate. If your website is targeted by referrer spammers you may not be able to identify your website’s actual bounce rate unless you filter the traffic out.
Campaign Source Filter
A campaign source filter can be used to block all uptime-us.net referral traffic in Google Analytics.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab > Click Filters on the right side in the VIEW section.
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add uptime-us.net 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 uptime-us.net 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 | Example\.com | uptime-us.net
Campaign Referral Path Filter
A campaign referral path filter can be used to block single webpages.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab > Click Filters on the right side in the VIEW section.
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add uptime-us.net or something you can easily remember as the Filter Name.
4. Select the Custom Filter Type.
5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Referral Path in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add a permalink from the referred URL and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage
Language Settings Filter
Some spam may appear in your language settings as keywords, phrases, and searched terms. A language settings filter can be used to block language spam in Google Analytics.
1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab
2. In the “View” column select Filters and then click + Add Filter
3. Add a Filter Name: Language Spam (or something you can easily remember)
4. Go to: Filter Type > Custom > Exclude
5. Select Filter Field: Language settings
6. Add a Filter Pattern: \s[^s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,
7. Click on the blue text that says Verify this filter to see a preview table of how this filter will work in your account. You should only see language spam on the left side of the table: filter-verification-language-spam
8. After you verify the filter click the Save button on the bottom of the page
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