How to stop free-social-buttons.com referral traffic
Free-social-buttons.com referral spam (also known as referrer spam) is quickly becoming a very big issue for a lot of webmasters, website owners, and those who provide website services to clients who are new in the field. Free-social-buttons.com referral traffic in Google Analytics can mess with your Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior analytical website data, such as your website’s bounce rate. This is because the spam URL only lands on a single webpage and leaves from the same webpage. Free-social-buttons.com referral traffic can also use up a website’s bandwidth and cause confusion for new website owners who don’t know why they’re getting referral traffic from free-social-buttons.com.
This guide will help you stop free-social-buttons.com referral spam in Google Analytics and block free-social-buttons.com referrer spam at the source using your website’s .htaccess file in order to stop receiving free-social-buttons.com referral traffic.
What is free-social-buttons.com?
Free-social-buttons.com is a website that engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website analytical data. Free-social-buttons.com referrer spam is designed to create repeated site requests to the website it lands on. The benefits that referral spammers have with this tactic is that it will help them advertise the website they want people to visit, which is currently sharebutton.to, and it will also improve the spammers search engine ranking. The downside is that traffic referrals with free-social-buttons.com as the source can interfere with your Google Analytics data and use up your a website’s bandwidth by creating repeat requests.
Referrer spam is a very questionable tactic used to promote online content. Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Spammers want to promote a specific webpage or program and want webmasters to visit the webpage or search for it online and visit it through Google results pages.
- Spammers want to boost their rank in Google Search and acquire backlinks.
Free-social-buttons.com 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 free-social-buttons.com 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 promoted by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website.
How to stop free-social-buttons.com referral spam in Google Analytics
To block free-social-buttons.com referrer spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking free-social-buttons.com referrer spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter will only mask the spam URL. To block the referrer spam URL at the sources please see the instructions below to block free-social-buttons.com referrer spam using your website’s .htaccess file.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.
2. Click the New Filter button to create a new filter.
3. Add free-social-buttons.com 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 free-social-buttons.com and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
How to stop free-social-buttons.com referral spam using your .htaccess file
To block free-social-buttons.com referrer spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} free-social-buttons.com [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
- Also see: How to block referrer spam
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