How To Block lifehacĸer.com Referral Spam

Before a few months back I have written a detailed article on Referral Spam and How to Exclude it from Google Analytics Report.

So let me tell you, that if you counter any referral spam in your Google analytic report, don’t be panic and calm down.

These are totally harmless bots and does not harm your website ranking and SEO.

Yesterday, I saw that I am getting traffic from Lifehacker site, but when I researched that where LifeHacker linked my site, I could not found anything. But after a little bit research, I found that lifehacĸer.com is not lifehacker.com. They are using the special character in the URL. So it was understood that these are referral spams.

If you are not sure that you that you are getting Referral Spam traffic data check out this article. It contains everything about how to find Referral Spam in your Google analytics.
So if you are getting referral traffic from thenextweb.com, addons.mozilla.org, etc. websites, consider it as referral spam. There are many other websites like these, so you need to check your analytic report very carefully.

Why they are Spamming your Google Analytic Report?

So when these bots are totally harmless for your website and its SEO then why these are spamming you. There are few reasons that why they manipulate your reports.

They want to seek your attention toward them.
They want people search about them on Google or visit their website.
They want to promote a web page.

What are the Downsides of This Spam

As I told you that these are the totally harmless bots those can’t affect your website. But there a few downside of these.

These bots manipulate your analytic data which can make it harder to analyze your analytic report. And if you want to make any decision on the basis your analytic stat, it can not be accurate.
The another downside is that it increases the bounce rate stat of your websites because bot came on your site and went in a few from your site. So it will be harder to know the actual bounce rate of your site.

How to Block Referral Spam like “lifehacĸer.com”

It is not a tough job to block referral spam like “lifehacĸer.com”, “thenextweb.com”, “addons.mozilla.org”, “Secret.ɢoogle.com” etc. You just need to exclude it from your analytic report. Follow the steps to block these spam bots from your analytic report.

Login to your Google Analytic and go to Admin Section.
Under the Account Section you will see All Filter Option, just click on that.
Now create a new filter, Name it and proceed to next option Field Type.
Choose Custom tab. When you click on Custom, it will expand to below.
Now click on Exclude radio button and choose Filter Field “Campaign Source” from the drop-down.
Paste all the spam URLs, you want to block in “Filter Pattern.” For example, I want to block lifehacĸer.com” and”thenextweb.com.” I will paste it like lifehacĸer.com|thenextweb.com. Do not use space between the URLs, use | (Symbol) to separate the URLs
At last, click on save, and you are done.