How to block publishvault.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
How to block publishvault.com referrer spam in Google Analytics
Publishvault.com is a website that engages in a blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing. The website will utilize various referrer spam URLs such as trafficgenius.xyz that forward to it in order to hit your website with deceptive and fraudulent referral traffic that does not technically “land” on your website. This is done in order to promote the publishvault.com website and the services they provide. However, in partaking in this deceptive spam tactic the referred URLs can essentially ruin your website’s appropriate analytical data measured by Google Analytics.
Publishvault.com referrer spam and referrer spam from other well known spam URLs such as googlemare.com is becoming a big issue and hot topic of discussion for many bloggers, webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate data. Unwanted publishvault.com referrals 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 the results of your appropriate bounce rate. This is not the only Google Analytics data that publishvault.com referrals can ruin. It can essentially mix useless data into everything provided in Audience, Acquisition, Conversions, and Behavior reports.
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What is publishvault.com?
Publishvault.com is a website that engages in a blackhat SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing. The website does this in order to aggressively promote their paid services.
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.
How to block publishvault.com referrer spam
This guide shows you how to block publishvault.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter to stop referral traffic that forward to publishvault.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 publishvault.com, “Referrer Spam Filter,” 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 the referrer spam URL that forwards to publishvault.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 | publishvault.com | trafficgenius.xyz
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
