How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral traffic
How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral traffic
You may have noticed a boost in website traffic from webmaster-traffic.com. Webmaster-traffic.com is a URL that actively engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Webmaster-traffic.com referrer spam is designed to promote the website they want you to visit, such as quicktraffic.co, and boost their website’s rank in Google search results by creating backlinks off your website’s access logs.
However, webmaster-traffic referrer spam can destroy your website’s appropriate data measured by Google Analytics data and other services, including the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior analytical data measured by GA. For example, referrer spam can ruin your bounce rate because the spam URL only lands on a single webpage and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also show up as a source from a variety of geographical sources globally.
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- What is webmaster-traffic.com?
- How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam in Google Analytics
- How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam with your htaccess file
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What is webmaster-traffic.com?
Webmaster-traffic.com is a website that engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Webmaster-traffic.com referrer spam is designed to produce repeated site requests onto your website at any given time and from any location around the world using traffic bots, computers infected with malicious software, and other blackhat tactics. The benefits that referral spammers have by engaging in referrer spamming is that it will allow them advertise the website they want people to visit and it will improve the spammers search engine ranking by creating backlinks to their website off your website’s access log.
The downside to unwanted webmaster-traffic referral traffic is that it can mess up your appropriate Google Analytics data and other website metrics provided by third-party services. In some cases it can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests.
Referrer spam is a very questionable tactic used to promote online content. Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Referrer spammers want to promote a webpage 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 bot and seen as a backlink to the spam site.
Webmaster-traffic.com referrer spam is not entirely 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 webmaster-traffic.com spam 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.
How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam in Google Analytics
To block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking webmaster-traffic.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter will only mask the spam URL. To block the referrer spam URL at the sources see the instructions below to block webmaster-traffic.com referrer spam using your website’s .htaccess file.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.
2. Click the New Filter button to create a new filter.
3. Add webmaster-traffic.com 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 webmaster-traffic.com and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
How to block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam with your .htaccess file
To block webmaster-traffic.com referral spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} webmaster-traffic.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} webmaster-traffic.com RewriteRule .* - [F]
- Also see: How to block referrer spam