How to block petitions.whitehouse.gov spam in Google Analytics

3 Methods: Campaign Source Filter  |  Campaign Referral Path Filter | Language Settings Filter

Petitions.whitehouse.gov spam in Google Analytics promotes a petition to Ban Google’s Blatant Suppression of Free Speech.

A spammer recently started to spam petitions.whitehouse.gov in Google Analytics accounts. The spam promotes a petition on petitions.whitehouse.gov called “Petition to Ban Google’s Blatant Suppression of Free Speech.” (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/petition-ban-googles-blatant-suppression-free-speech)

The petition claims “Google, which controls 67.5% of internet searches in the United States is attempting to silence any voice that doesn’t coincide with their political views.” It also states that “this week Google wiped 140,000 Naturalnews.com articles from its database, prohibiting individuals from viewing the sites webpages if searched.”

You are welcome to sign the petition or ignore it as you seem fit. The reason why you are seeing this spam in your Google Analytics reports is to promote this petition and associated parties. However, the downside to this type of spam is that his work can ruin your Google Analytics data and make it hard to monitor your website’s 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 petitions.whitehouse.gov 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.

Campaign Source Filter

This method will block all petitions.whitehouse.gov referral traffic in Google Analytics. To block a specific path (webpage) on the domain use the Campaign Referral Path 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 Petitions.whitehouse.gov 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 Petitions.whitehouse.gov 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 | Petitions.whitehouse.gov

Campaign Referral Path 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 Petitions.whitehouse.gov or something you can easily remember as the Filter Name.

4. Select the Custom Filter Type.

5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Referral Path in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add petition-ban-googles-blatant-suppression-free-speech (or a larger portion of th permalink) and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage

Language Settings Filter

A language settings filter can be used to block language spam in Google Analytics.

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab

2. In the “View” column select Filters and then click + Add Filter

3. Add a Filter Name: Language Spam (or something you can easily remember)

4. Go to: Filter Type > Custom > Exclude

5. Select Filter Field: Language settings

6. Add a Filter Pattern: \s[^s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,

7. Click on the blue text that says Verify this filter to see a preview table of how this filter will work in your account. You should only see language spam on the left side of the table: filter-verification-language-spam

8. After you verify the filter click the Save button on the bottom of the page