How to stop marketland.ml referral spam in Google Analytics
What is marketland.ml?
There are many referrer spam websites that promote work-from-home schemes and marketland.ml is one of them. Don’t be alarmed if you notice marketland.ml referral traffic and data mixed into your website’s Google Analytics reports because no one was actually referred to your website from marketland.ml. Marketland.ml is a referrer spam website that spams Google Analytics data with deceptive and fraudulent data in order to persuade victims to visit the website. If you notice marketland.ml referral traffic and other data from the domain name mixed into your Google Analytics reports it means that your Google Analytics account is being targeted by spammers. The referrer spammers want it to appear as if someone was referred to your website from marketland.ml; However, as previously mentioned, no one was referred to your website from this website.
Why are marketland.ml referrals spamming my website?
The reason why your Google Analytics account is being targeted by marketland.ml referral traffic is to get your attention and persuade you to visit the URL in your web browser. If you visit the URL you will be directed to a webpage that promotes various work-from-home schemes. The initial landing page may say “Learn How An Unemployed Dad Went From Nothing To $9,117 Per Month Working Online…” and when you click the link on the page you will be redirected to one of several affiliated websites. All the links on the website are affilaite links generated by a person named kingfranek. Kingfranek owns many deceptive referrer spam websites and is notorious for utilizing the referrer spam tactic.
We do not recommend websites that engage in referrer spam. Referrer spam is a blackhat SEO tactic that completely disregards your website’s data in order to desperately and recklessly promote online content.
Referrer spammers typically 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.
Is marketland.ml referrer spam harmful?
Marketland.ml referral spam is not essentially harmful to your website and it will not affect your rank in Google Search Results Pages; However, marketland.ml referrer spam can ruin the data collected in your Google Analytics reports if you do not block it from targeting your account. For example, if marketland.ml referrals appear to land on a single webpage on your website and leave from the same website it will create a 100% bounce rate. If your website is targeted by referrer spammers you may not be able to identify your website’s bounce rate. The same can be said about other data measured in most Google Analytics reports.
How to stop marketland.ml referral spam in Google Analytics
These instructions show you how to block marketland.ml referrals and other referrer spam URLs in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter. This is the method recommended by Google to block this type of referrer traffic.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab. Click All Filters on the left side.
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button to create a new filter.
3. Add marketland.ml or something else that you can remember as the Filter Name. If you plan to add more spam URLs to the list you can name the list something like “Referrer Spam Filter.”
4. Select the Custom Filter Type from the two options.
5. In Filter Field Field select Campaign Source.
6. In the Filter Pattern box, add marketland.ml 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 | marketland.ml
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
