What is free-seo-consultation.com and how do I filter it?
Free-seo-consultation.com
Learn what free-seo-consultation.com is, why it is spamming you, and how to filter free-seo-consultation.com referral traffic in Google Analytics.
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What is Free-seo-consultation.com?
Free-seo-consultation.com is domain named owned by Semalt.com and used to promote their questionable online SEO services. Semalt utilizes a blackhat SEO method called referrer spam indexing to spam your Google Analytics data with fake referral traffic.
When you see free-seo-consultation.com referral traffic in your Google Analytics data, it will appear as if someone visited your website from free-seo-consultation.com and landed on a web page on your site that does not exist such as /h/10016924.html. The purpose of this is to persuade you to visit free-seo-consultation.com in your browser.
If you visit free-seo-consultation.com you will be forwarded to http://seo2.x2snowboarding.com/?site=http:// or another site with a similar link. This page contains a search field that asks you for your domain name and if you enter your domain name and click ‘START NOW’ you will be forwarded to https://semalt.com/?s=http://[domain you searched]&ref=test2 and then to https://semalt.com/project/3672045. Semalt uses these pages to bolster their shady online marketing services. They have been using the same spamming method for many years. Previous domain names you might have seen in your Google Analytics data include get-seo-help.com, seo-services-with-results.com, free-seo-help.org, better-seo-promotion.com, and many others.
Free-seo-consultation.com employs various blackhat methods to make it appear as if someone was referred to your website from the domain name. However, no visitor was actually referred to the website from the URL and the domain name will not use up bandwidth on your website. It is simply a gimmick that spams Google Analytics without affecting your website or server.
Website owners and other people who monitor Google Analytics data will notice real-time and historical referral traffic coming from free-seo-consultation.com mixed in with real analytical data. 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 large amount of referral traffic from free-seo-consultation.com they might be suspicious as to why someone is visiting their website from a page on the free-seo-consultation.com website. As previously mentioned, the website uses this technique to dupe people into searching for the website on a search engine such as Google and visiting the website by typing it into the address bar in order to obtain potential customers.
Although this sort of traffic might sound harmless, referrer spam can actually ruin your website’s analytical data and make it difficult to understand your website’s exact traffic metrics. 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 web page 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 free-seo-consultation.com 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 free-seo-consultation.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 free-seo-consultation.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 | Example\.com | free-seo-consultation.com
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 free-seo-consultation.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 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
This is perfect! They visited my site over 60 times and definitely are not a customer. Thank you for helping them disappear. I wish I could just block them all together but this is a good start.