How to block autoseotips.com referral traffic in Google Analytics

Autoseotips.com is a domain name owned and used by Semalt.com to advertise their website and services. Semalt utilizes a deceitful tactic known as referrer spam to make it appear as if visitors were referred to your site from autoseotips.com; However, no visitors were actually referred to your site.

The purposes of this is to get your attention and persuade you to visit autoseotips.com in your browser. If you visit autoseotips.com you will be forwarded to another website such as http://seo2.ftcchurch.org/?site=http://. The website asks you to “analyze your website and get an unlimited SEO checklist” and if you submit your website you will be forwarded to https://semalt.com/?s=http://[search term]&ref=test2 and then to https://semalt.com/project/[project ID].

Semalt has been engaged in referrer spam indexing for many years. They are notorious for spamming Google Analytics data across the globe and it does not appear to be slowing down any time soon. According to records, they purchase new domain names for this purpose just about every weekday.

Referrer spam may seem harmless or simply a nuisance but it can actually ruin your Google Analytics data. For example, fake visitors from autoseotips.com appear to visit only one page on your site and leave from the same page which creates a 100% bounce rate and measures to 1 page per session. Visitors also average 00:00:00 length of a session among other metrics.

A website that does not care about ruining your Google analytics data and using obnoxious methods to gain your attention cannot be trusted.

Create a filter

Here’s how to create a campaign source filter to block all autoseotips.com referral traffic in Google Analytics.

1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to Admin > Filters (on the right side in the VIEW section).
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button.
3. Create a Filter Name such as “autoseotips.com filter” or “Semalt filter.”
4. Select the Custom Filter Type.
5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source.
6. In the Filter Pattern text box, add autoseotips.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the web page.

To add multiple domain names to the same filter you can make a Filter Pattern similar to this with a | between each URL: Example.com | Example\.com | autoseotips.com