If you monitor or maintain a Google Analytics account, chances are that you have noticed unusual referral traffic from lets-go-now.com and other domain names. What makes lets-go-now.com referral traffic stand out is that the visitors appear to land on a page on a site you own that does not actually exist, such as example.com/h/10016924.html. Although the traffic to your site may appear to be legitimate, it’s not. No referral traffic was actually sent to your website from lets-go-now.com. The purpose of referrer spam is to catch your attention and persuade you to visit lets-go-now.com.
Referral traffic from lets-go-now.com will create a 100% bounce rate and be referred to your website from a page that doesn’t exist either. If you visit lets-go-now.com you will be forwarded to another website such as http://seo2.homesbyweb.co.uk/?site=http://get-here-web, http://seo2.bournemouthkawasakiracing.co.uk/?site=http://, http://seo2.inkstoneeditorial.com/?site=http://, http://seo2.clientsothersite.com/?site=http://, or other. The page you are forwarded to contains a text field where you can submit your website for an audit and if you submit your site you will be forwarded to https://semalt.com/?s=http://[search term]&ref=test2 and then to https://semalt.com/project/[project ID].
Semalt.com owns lets-go-now.com along with many other domain names and on every business day, Semalt.com will use a new domain name to spam Google Analytics accounts with fake referral traffic.
We recommend that you avoid providing Semalt with your email address or a way to contact you because you will receive a large number of deceptive spam messages from Semalt each day.
Is referrer spam harmful?
Referrer spam may seem harmless or somewhat of a nuisance but it can actually ruin your Google Analytics data by manufacturing incorrect information. For example, fake visitors from lets-go-now.com appear to visit only one page on your site and leave your site from the same page. This creates a 100% bounce rate and measures to 1 page per session. Visitors also average 00:00:00 length of a session, among other changes to various site metrics.
Also, keep in mind that no one was actually referred to your website from lets-go-now.com. No one used your bandwidth or took a step onto your site’s server, so lets-go-now.com referral traffic is just filling your reports with false information.
How to create a filter
Here’s how to create a campaign source filter to block all lets-go-now.com referral traffic in Google Analytics.
- Open your Google Analytics account and go to Admin > Filters (on the right side in the VIEW section).
- Click the + ADD FILTER button.
- Create a Filter Name such as “lets-go-now.com filter” or “Semalt filter.”
- Select the Custom Filter Type.
- In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source.
- In the Filter Pattern text box, add lets-go-now.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 | lets-go-now.com
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