{"id":8364,"date":"2016-12-19T14:07:34","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T14:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/?p=8364"},"modified":"2018-09-12T06:05:46","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T06:05:46","slug":"vitaly-rules-google-twitter-referrer-spam-in-google-analytics-how-to-remove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/vitaly-rules-google-twitter-referrer-spam-in-google-analytics-how-to-remove\/","title":{"rendered":"“Vitaly Rules Google” – Twitter Referrer Spam in Google Analytics – How To Remove"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently released a new version of FreeFixer<\/a>, and as usual after a new release I spend too much time looking at Google Analytics Real-Time stats to check out what my visitors are doing on the web site.<\/p>\n

While doing this I noticed traffic with Twitter as the\u00a0referrer under “Top Social Traffic”:<\/p>\n

\"twitter-referer-spam-google-adsense\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Happy times, the users are talking about the new FreeFixer release on Twitter, I thought.<\/p>\n

The traffic appeared to be to be originating from Russia<\/strong> and\u00a0Google Analytics claimed that the page title was:<\/p>\n

“Vitaly rules google”<\/p>\n

\"vitaly-rules-google-analytics\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have no such title anywhere on my site. So, this is obviously spam \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

So, how can the Twitter referral spam be stopped?<\/p>\n

There are a bunch of methods to remove Analytics referer spam such as this one. One way \u00a0is to add the spammer’s IP address in the web server’s .htaccess<\/a> file.<\/p>\n

If you don’t have access to the spammers IP or the .htaccess file, you can filter out Twitter referrals in Google Analytics, with these steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Click on the Admin tab<\/strong>.\"admin-tab-google-adsense\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Click All Filters<\/strong> in the Account column to the left.\"all-filters\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Click the ADD\u00a0FILTER<\/strong> button to create a new filter. This filter can be used for all your sites that you have hooked up on Analytics.\"add-filter\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Give the filter a name<\/strong>, set Custom<\/strong> as the filter type and select Campaign Source<\/strong>.\u00a0\"filter-name-custom-campain-source\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Now we need\u00a0write a regular expression to block the unwanted referrers<\/strong>. In this example, I’ve blocked two sites, twitter.com and motherboard.vice.com. As you can see, each site is separated by the | character. \"twitter-com-filter\"<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. Add the filter<\/strong> to the view where you are experiencing the referrer spam problem, and click Save<\/strong>.\"apply-filter-and-save\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And that’s it. The Twitter.com referrer spam should now disappear from the Google Analytics Real-Time stats, and all the other statistics pages that can be shown.<\/p>\n

    In my case, I had to wait for a few minutes in order for the filter to take effect.<\/p>\n

    Did this help you remove the\u00a0“Vitaly Rules Google” Twitter referral spam?<\/p>\n

    Did the spam you were getting also originate from Russia?<\/p>\n

    Thank you for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I recently released a new version of FreeFixer, and as usual after a new release I spend too much time looking at Google Analytics Real-Time stats to check out what my visitors are doing on the web site. While doing this I noticed traffic with Twitter as the\u00a0referrer under “Top Social Traffic”: Happy times, the … Continue reading “Vitaly Rules Google” – Twitter Referrer Spam in Google Analytics – How To Remove<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[913],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8364"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8416,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8364\/revisions\/8416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.freefixer.com\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}