How to stop “for-your.website” referrals in Google Analytics
How to stop “for-your.website” referrals in Google Analytics
For-your.website is a referrer spam URL used to promote multiple websites including scribecontent.com and others. The referrer spam URL on the for-your.website domain will usually have a string attached to it like build-audience.for-your.website or smarter-content.for-your.website. The referrer spam URLs will forward to various webpages including the previously mentioned scribecontent.com website.
For-your.website referrer spam is designed to flood your Google Analytics data with deceptive and fraudulent web traffic by use of long and eye-catching referrals. This is done in order to promote the website and websites that the URLs forward to. For-your.website referrals may gain your attention and provoke you to visit the URL or search for it online, thus helping them build a better rank in search results pages and/or introducing you to various paid-for services and get rich quick schemes provided on the landing pages the URLs forward to.
For-your.website referrals domain name don’t actually land on your website. It is a type of web traffic known as ghost traffic that basically targets your Google Analytics ID at random and appears in your Google Analytics data. This can cause a lot of problems with your website’s appropriate analytical data. If you value your website’s data you will want to block for-your.website referral spam at the source by using the method suggested by Google. This is explained further below on this page.
For-your.website referrer spam and referrer spam in general is becoming a big issue for bloggers, webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate data. A new batch of referrer spam URLs began to circulate on December 25, 2015 and this is one of them. The blackhat SEO tactic does not seem to be slowing down any time soon but you can combat it and make it obsolete by blocking the spam sites in Google Analytics and completely avoiding the webpages.
A big issue with referrer spam is that it can ruin your website’s analytical data provided in Audience, Acquisition, Conversions, and Behavior reports. For example, the spam URLs usually ‘appear’ to land on a single webpage on your website and leave from the same webpage which can create a 100% bounce rate.
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.
For-your.website 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 referrer 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, which happens to be the case with this URL. They often target your GA ID number.
How to stop for-your.website referrals
This guide shows you how to block for-your.website referrals in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter to stop for-your.website 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 for-your.website 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 for-your.website and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add multiple address you can make a Filter Pattern like this: example.com | for-your.website