How to block hugedomains.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
Block hugedomains.com referral spam in Google Analytics
Hugedomains.com is an alleged premium domain re-seller site. The businesses has a very bad online reputation. Reports have cited the website for cybersquating, link spam, massive hacking attempts, hosting malware, and various scams. We have recently discovered a new tactic being used by hugedomains.com to acquire potential customers. Hugedomains.com has begun to utilizing the blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing to target Google Analytics data with dubious referral traffic from domains they are attempting to sell.
The way that hugedomains.com referrer spam works is that they will target various Google Analytics user’s accounts with fake referral traffic known as ghost traffic. A URL we recently noticed being used is uptimechecker.com. The URL will appear in Google Analytics reports as a referrer. The referrer spam URL may claim to be referred from a nonexistent webpage associated with your website such as uptimechecker.com/example.com. When you visit the URL you will be forwarded to a hugedomains.com webpage that says “UptimeChecker.com is for sale.” The page will attempt to sell the domain at an excessive price.
Hugedomains.com referrer spam is designed to mix inappropriate web data into your Google Analytics account in order to aggressively gain your attention and provoke you to visit the website it promotes or search for it online. Referrer spam is not essentially harmful to your website and the way it appears in Google Search Results Pages, but it can ruin your website’s appropriate data measured in Google Analytics reports such as your bounce rate and time on site.
Hugedomains.com referrer spam and referrer spam from other URLs such as googlemare.com is becoming a big issue and hot topic of discussion for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate data. Unwanted hugedomains.com referral traffic can ruin your website’s analytical data. For example, the spam URL usually appears to land on a single webpage on your website and leave from the same webpage which interfere with your appropriate bounce rate. This is not the only Google Analytics data that hugedomains.com referral spam can ruin. It can essentially mix useless data into everything provided in Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports.
Fortunately, we have created a guide to block hugedomains.com referral spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that targets the Campaign Source. This will stop hugedomains.com referral spam from interfering with your data measured by Google Analytics.
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What is Hugedomains.com?
Hugedomains.com is an alleged premium domain re-seller site with a very bad online reputation. We advise you to avoid giving this website your personal information and using the website to search for domains.
The downside to unwanted hugedomains.com referral traffic for website owners is that it can mess up the appropriate Google Analytics data.
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.
Hugedomains.com 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 block Hugedomains.com referral spam in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to block hugedomains.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter to stop referral traffic URLs that forward to hugedomains.com.
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 the URL you want to block or something you can 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 the spam URL that forwards to hugedomains.com 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 | hugedomains.com | uptimechecker.com
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
