How to block startwp.org referral spam in Google Analytics
How to block startwp.org referral spam in Google Analytics
Startwp.org is a questionable website associated with a large referrer spam network. Startwp.org utilizes various spam URLs such as fast-wordpress-start.com that have been designed to hit your website’s Google Analytics data with deceptive referral traffic. The URLs then forward to startwp.org. The website will send ghost traffic to your Google Analytics web data in order to aggressively gain your attention and provoke you to visit the website or search for it online. Startwp.org referral traffic 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 visitor duration.
Startwp.org 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 startwp.org 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 startwp.org 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 startwp.org referral spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that targets the Campaign Source. This will stop startwp.org referral spam from interfering with your data measured by Google Analytics.
Quick Links
What is startwp.org?
Startwp.org is a referrer spam website that utilizes various other referrer spam URLs that forward to it. The website will send ghost traffic to your data in hopes that you will notice it and visit their website. The websites promote an untrustworthy WordPress service.
The downside to unwanted startwp.org 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.
startwp.org 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 startwp.org
This guide shows you how to block startwp.org referral spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter to stop startwp.org referral traffic at the source.
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 startwp.org 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 startwp.org 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 | startwp.org
Also See: How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders in Google Analytics (Bot Filtering)
