How to block Google-Liar.Ru spam in Google Analytics

3 Methods: Campaign Source Filter  |  Campaign Referral Path Filter | Language Settings Filter

Russian Vitaly Popov is spamming Google-Liar.Ru referral traffic in your Google Analytics after losing domain name to Google.

A Russian referrer spammer named Vitaly Poplov has been taking some heat from Google lately due to his previous referrer spam efforts and domain names he owns that are similar to the Google.com domain. Vitaly is known to spam webpages of legitimate websites and pages of websites he owns across Google Analytics accounts and Google-Liar.Ru is one of them. If your Google Analytics data is randomly targeted by the spammer you will notice an unusual amount of referral traffic coming from a webpage on google-liar.ru.

The reason why you are seeing this spam in your Google Analytics reports is because Vitarly Poplov lost a battle with Google due to his ɢoogle.com domain name that appears similar to Google.com (the G is different). Google now has control of Poplov’s ɢoogle.com domain name. Poplov claims that Google lied to acquire his domain name and that he wants the world to know.

Vitaly has been spamming many URLs and hidden keywords in promotion of his own ventures for a very long time. The downside to this persistent spammer is that his work can ruin your Google Analytics data and make it hard to monitor your website’s appropriate information. The traffic acquired from referrer spam can affect most of the data in your GA reports. For example, the 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.

Although referrer spam can ruin your analytical data it will not harm your website or affect your website’s SEO, including your rank in Google search results pages. This is simply spam that wants to get your attention.

The spammer will utilize various tactics in order to make it look like your website received referral traffic from google-liar.ru even though it really did not. This type of web traffic is a specific type of web traffic known as “ghost traffic.” The spammer essentially sends phantom visitors to your website’s Google Analytics account in order to make it appear as if someone visited your website from the referral URL.

Referrer spammers usually target your website’s data 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.

Campaign Source Filter

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 Google-Liar.Ru 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 Google-Liar.Ru 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 | Google-Liar.Ru

Campaign Referral Path Filter

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 Google-Liar.Ru 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 Google-Liar.Ru (or a larger portion of th permalink) and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage

Language Settings Filter

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