Website Referral Spam!

byManikaHenn

344 followers

6 years ago

Hey everyone!

So I had just uploaded a post yesterday and noticed that the very next day I received hugely boosted page views! Of course, I was pleasantly surprised and happy that I was getting so much traffic. But me, being curious, went to Google Analytics to check out my traffic. Alas, it was too good to be true!

The majority of my referral traffic (which was around 35 views compared to my average of 1-2) came from this site called we-b-promos .review (I put a space because I want everyone to see the address). It was either .review or .space or .tech or some other random word. I went to visit the site and found out it was a fraud!!

I don't recommend you visit these websites yourself because:

1. They could have viruses and malware

2. The whole point of them bombarding your website with views is so that people like you go and visit their website (thus increasing the actual hits to their website and giving these undeserving people the benefits of increased traffic)

I learned that these are bots made to artificially increase traffic to your site (and Google, if they found out, would frown heavily on your website if it continues to happen)

I looked around on WA to see if there was a solution to my problem and found a pretty decent post on WA by PJGermain that I've included below!

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.co...

That training helped me to block these sites from ever visiting my site again (and helped me improve my analytics accuracy). Please look through the training if you've experienced this problem as PJ goes through everything, from editing your htaccess file to adding filters on Google Analytics!

If YOU have also experienced spam referrals from we-b-promo, then you can copy and paste these lines of code to your htaccess file to permanently block them (Only do this if you fully understand the above training and comprehend the risks involved. This is a disclaimer, and a warning. Please be careful when editing your htaccess file. There should not be any formatting differences (such as spaces) between the code here and the code in your file; that's why I advocate copying and pasting):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.space [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.review [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.tech [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.science [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.online [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?:\/\/([^.]+\.)*we\-b\-promo\.date [NC,OR]

If you've gotten bombarded by any other variants from we-b-promo, simply add another line of code with the variant included!

I made this post because we-b-promo hasn't been an established spam referral agent yet (hardly shows up on Google), and wanted to help anyone facing similar issues! However, this is rather advanced training and don't attempt this if you're unsure! I'm not responsible for any issues that may arise with the use of this information.

But I felt that the training linked is really very useful and would help lots of lost souls like myself out, so do take a look and see if it applies to you!

Thank you for reading this rather long post but hopefully it helps you guys out, and here's wishing everyone a fantastic day!