How to Block lifehacĸer.com Referral Spam

2 Methods: Create an Exclude Filter | Filter Language Spam in Google Analytics

What is lifehacĸer.com?

Don’t be alarmed to see unusual lifehacĸer.com referral traffic mixed in with your website’s Google Analytics data. The referral traffic is not actually lifehacker.com. It’s a domain name that replaces the K in lifehacker.com with a special “ĸ” figure in order to make it look like the real website. A Russian referrer spammer named Vitaly recently began to spam a few legitimate and legitimate-looking domain names across Google Analytics accounts around the globe and lifehacĸer.com is one of them. Other legitimate domain names that this spammer spammed include reddit.com, abc.xyz, thenextweb.com, addons.mozilla.org, and many more. The reason why this spammer is spamming your Google Analytics data with lifehacĸer.com referral traffic and referral traffic from other legitimate websites is to get your attention and persuade you to visit the associated URLs in your web browser.

Associated URLs

http://lifehacĸer.com/new-revolutionary-shell-from-lifehacĸer.com/
http://o-o-8-o-o.com/

This spammer has been referrer spamming various browser add-ons and websites for quite some time and doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. The downside to this is that it can ruin your Google Analytics data and make it hard to monitor your 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 lifehacĸer.com 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.

Create an Exclude 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 lifehacĸer.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 lifehacĸer.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 | lifehacĸer.com

Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)