Stop top1-seo-service.com referral spam in Google Analytics
Top1-seo-service.com is the latest semalt.com referrer spam URL that spams your Google Analytics data with deceptive referral traffic. Top1-seo-service.com referral traffic is designed to gain your attention by mixing fraudulent web data into your Google Analytics reports. Once you notice top1-seo-service.com referral traffic in your website’s data it may provoke you to visit the website. The top1-seo-service.com URL forwards to semalt.com; a SEO service notorious for referrer spam and unethical behavior.
Top1-seo-service.com referral traffic is a type of web traffic known as ghost traffic that never actually lands on your website. Since ghost traffic does not land on your website it will not interfere with bandwidth and other resources the way traffic bots and spiders do but it can ruin data measured by Google Analytics.
Referrer spam has become a very big problem for webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data. Referrer spam can ruin data measured by Google Analytics and fill analytic reports with undesirable content. The website data that referrer spam can have an affect on includes everything measured in Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports. For example, top1-seo-service.com referrer spam can interfere with your bounce rate because the spam URL data shows that it typically “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.
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What is top1-seo-service.com?
Top1-seo-service.com is a referrer spam URL used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world. The URL top1-seo-service.com website is used to promote a questionable SEO business notorious for referrer spam. According to domain reports the spam URL is owned by Semalt.com, as well as many others that forward to the website.
The downside to top1-seo-service.com referral traffic is that it can ruin your website’s appropriate Google Analytics data. In some cases referrer spam via bots, crawlers, and spiders can 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.
Referrer 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 off your website. 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.
There are many different referrer spam URLs and many ways to create artificial traffic that can negatively affect your website and website data. In order to promote web content many spammers utilize bad traffic bots and spiders, computers infected with malware, and other tools. It is important to block bad and misleading web traffic to understand your website’s appropriate data.
Referrer spam is not essentially harmful to your website and it will not affect your rank in Google search. Google and Google Analytics is well aware of bad and unwanted referral and direct traffic that may attempt to mix into your website’s data. Although they cannot keep track of the new referrer spam URLs that come into fruition they are aware that spammers target their user’s GA ID number and tracking code and will take measures to ensure nothing is negatively affected.
How to stop top1-seo-service.com referral spam in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to stop and block top1-seo-service.com referral traffic in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that targets the campaign source. While you’re at it we recommend to enable the exclude all hits from known bots and spiders bot filtering feature in Google Analytics to block bad bots that may affect your website.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab. Click All Filters.
2. Click the + ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add top1-seo-service.com 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 top1-seo-service.com and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add more than one URL make a Filter Pattern similar to this: top1-seo-service.com | example.com | example.com | example.com
