Dealing With Google Analytics Referral Spam (bot-traffic.xyz, bottraffic.live, etc.) | Skipblast

Dealing With Google Analytics Referral Spam (bot-traffic.xyz, bottraffic.live, etc.)

If you’ve noticed some crazy spikes in your Google Analytics recently, then you’ve likely been hit by bot traffic.

I really hate when this happens because it fucks up your traffic data.

And I almost lost a site sale once a few years ago when the semalt bot traffic was new and neither the broker nor the buyer was familiar with it. They legit thought I was sending bot traffic to the site while trying to close the deal.

8ns2Gr0

Anyways, a new semalt is in town and they are fucking up Google Analytics data all over the place.

If you haven’t yet seen this in your analytics data, then consider yourself lucky.

Where To Find The Bot URLs

For those of you who have never had to deal with this before, you can find the URL of the bot in Google Analytics.

Just go to Acquisition –> All Traffic –> Referrals

Here’s what it looks like for one of my sites

bot traffic

The new bot traffic seems to be coming from one, or more, of the following sites:

  • bot-traffic.xyz
  • bottraffic.live
  • trafficbot.life
  • bot-traffic.life
  • bot-traffic.icu

How To Block Referral Spam in Google Analytics

If you’ve already been hit by these bastards, then you can’t really fix that spike in your traffic data. (as far as I know)

But you can set up a filter to block any future data interference from these particular bots.

So, open your Google Analytics and click on that gear icon in the lower left of the screen.

analytics admin

Then in the third column on your screen, the View column, look for “Filters” and click on that.

Then, click on the red “Add Filter” button.

Leave “Create New Filter” selected, name your filter, and click on “Custom” under ” Filter Type”

Leave “Exclude” selected and in the dropdown select “Campaign Source”

Then, copy and paste the following into the “Filter Pattern” box: bot-traffic|trafficbot| bottraffic

analytics filter

And then, click on “Save” at the bottom and you’re done.

Now you shouldn’t see any of the referral spam from those domains going forward. But if I remember correctly, you’ll still be able to see the bot traffic that is already present in the data.

This is also a good time to note that I’m not super well versed in all things Google Analytics, so there may be other/easier ways to go about blocking this referral spam.

Here’s a few places where other site owners are talking about these specific bots:

  • https://organicdigital.co/blog/how-to-block-spam-traffic-from-bot-traffic-icu-in-google-analytics/
  • https://community.cloudflare.com/t/bottraffic-live/240745
  • https://www.analytics-toolkit.com/referrer-spam/trafficbot.life/ (this one suggests a different filter in GA)
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/lagw3b/lots_of_organic_search_spam_traffic_in_google/

oMldOky

4 thoughts on “Dealing With Google Analytics Referral Spam (bot-traffic.xyz, bottraffic.live, etc.)”

    • Not me, I foolishly got excited thinking I’d had a post go viral 🙂 Then I was just annoyed when I realized what was going on. Glad it help you though 🙂

      Reply
  1. Thanks. I had the fast up and down of thinking we had gotten a viral post or something, then thinking we’d been hacked. Oy ve!

    I appreciate the help. Cheers.

    Reply

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