How to stop wordpress-crew.net referral spam in Google Analytics
WordPress-crew.net is a website that engages in shameful SEO tactic known as referrer spam indexing. The spam website utilizes the referrer spam tactic to aggressively promote the website and get people to visit it. The wordpress-crew.net referrer spam website uses traffic bot crawlers to hit your website with unusual web traffic from different sources and from different geological areas. Bot crawlers can actually be a bad thing. It can use your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests and disrupt your website’s appropriate data calculated by Google Analytics.
Bot traffic from wordpress-crew.net can help promote the website. It does this by gaining your attention in your website’s referral traffic. This may provoke you to visit the website. It also does this by creating backlinks off of your website’s access logs.
WordPress-crew.net referrer spam and referrer spam in general from other URLs like copyrightclaims.org and many more is a growing problem for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate and true analytical data. Referrer spam can ruin website data measured by Google Analytics. The website data it can affect includes everything measured in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior areas by Google Analytics. For example, wordpress-crew.net referrer spam can destroy your bounce rate because the spam URL typically only lands on a single webpage on your website and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world, from various resources, and more.
Quick Links
- What is WordPress-crew.net?
- Stop Wordpress-crew.net referral spam with an exclude filter
- Stop Wordpress-crew.net referral spam with your htaccess file
What is WordPress-crew.net?
WordPress-crew.net is an untrustworthy and desperate pay-for WordPress development website that utilizes referrer spam tactics to gain web traffic in order to promote their allegedly overpriced WordPress services. The wordpress-crew.net domain name is used to hit your website with referral traffic from different locations around the world using traffic bots. The benefits that spammers have by engaging in referrer spamming is that it will allow them advertise the website; by creating backlinks to their website off your website’s access log or getting you and other people to notice the referral traffic – which makes you visit the website.
The downside to unwanted wordpress-crew.net referral traffic for website owners is that it can mess up the appropriate Google Analytics data and other website metrics provided by third-party services. It can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests. However, this is not the case with this URL since it primarily generates ghost hits that do not actually land on your website.
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.
WordPress-crew.net 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, it may use up your website’s bandwidth and CPU by creating multiple site requests to your website.
Stop Wordpress-crew.net referral spam in Google Analytics
To block Wordpress-crew.net referral spam in your Google Analytics account follow the instructions below to create a simple exclude filter.
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 WordPress-crew.net or the URL or something you can 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 wordpress-crew.net 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.net | example.net | example.net | wordpress-crew.net
Stop WordPress-crew.net referral spam with your .htaccess file
To block referrer spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} wordpress-crew.net [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} wordpress-crew.net
RewriteRule .* - [F]
