How to block “video–production.com” referral traffic in Google Analytics
How to block “video–production.com” referral traffic in Google Analytics
Video–production.com referral traffic is a big problem for many webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data. If you notice referral traffic from video–production.com you’re not alone. Video–production.com is the latest referrer spam URL used by semaltmedia.com and other webpages. Video–production.com referrer spam is designed to attack your website’s analytical data with suspicious referral traffic and build backlinks off your website’s access logs in order to promote the websites they want you visit and boost their rank in Google search results pages.
The issue that webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data has with referrer spam is that it can ruin data measured by Google Analytics and other analytical services. Data that video–production.com referrer spam and unwanted referral traffic in general affects includes everything covered in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior areas measured by Google Analytics. For example, video–production.com referrer spam can mess-up your bounce rate because the spam URL ‘usually’ 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.
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- What is video–production.com?
- How to block video–production.com referral traffic in Google Analytics
- How to block video–production.com referral traffic with your htaccess file
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What is video–production.com?
Video–production.com is a referrer spam URL that actively engages in referrer spam indexing tactics aimed at your website’s analytical data. Video–production.com referrer spam is designed to produce repeated site requests onto your website at any given time and from any global location using traffic bots, computers infected with malicious software, and other blackhat SEO tactics. The benefits that referrer spammers have by engaging in this tactic is that it will allow them advertise the website they want people to visit, which is semaltmedia.com (in this case), and it will improve the spammers search engine ranking by creating backlinks to their spam website off your website’s access log.
The downside of unwanted video–production.com referral traffic is that it can ruin your appropriate Google Analytics data and other website metrics provided by third-party services. In some cases it can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests on your server.
Referrer spam is a very questionable tactic used to promote online content. Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Referrer spammers want to promote a webpage 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. Referrer spammers create backlinks off your website by logging requests into your access log. Your access log is then crawled by Google bot and seen as a backlink to the spam site.
Video–production.com referrer spam is not entirely dangerous to your website and it will most likely not cause any trouble with how your website is accessed by your visitors or ranked on Google SERPs. However, in some cases video–production.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 served to your analytical data by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website.
How to block video–production.com referral spam in Google Analytics
To block video–production.com referral spam in Google Analytics follow the instructions below. Blocking video–production.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 see the instructions below to block video–production.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 video–production.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 video–production.com and click the Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
How to block video–production.com referral spam with your .htaccess file
To block video–production.com referral spam at the source using your .htacess file add the code below to your .htaccess file.
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} video--production.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} video--production.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]
- Also see: How to block referrer spam
