The Lifehacĸer.com referral spam in Google Analytics is a new breed of problem. This page is dedicated to eradicating it from your GA statistics.
If you have been affected by the likes of Lifehacĸer.com, you’ve found the right page to help you deal with this problem. Referral spam is among the most annoying things you could be faced with as a website owner, and though it’s not something malicious or dangerous, it is recommended to deal with the spammers as quickly as possible. In this article we will explain how referral spam operates and what you can do to protect yourself from it in the future. Also, we will provide a detailed removal guide below the article to help you block Lifehacĸer.com. It is important that you read the information provided here first, however, so as to be informed of the things you shouldn’t do, as well.
Lifehacĸer.com: How it works
Lifehacĸer.com would more accurately be referred to as ghost spam. That is to distinguish it from its predecessor, whom you will hardly ever encounter – classic referral spam. The latter was successfully combated by Google and its existence is kept to a very bare minimum. In both cases, the referral spammers aim to gain traffic for their own website. That’s why they target immense numbers of various websites and get the website owners to click back on them, thus generating traffic. The difference between the two subtypes is the means, by which they aimed to accomplish this. In the case of classic referral spam, the spammers would send bots and crawlers to your site. There would usually be some noticeable amount of visits with literally no session time and the idea was to trigger your curiosity and get you to click back. Simple. This activity was easier to block for Google due to the employing of bots and crawlers.
So, as a result ghost spam like Lifehacĸer.com emerged. Instead of using the crawlers, the spammers took straight to the Google Analytics stats of the targeted sites. In them, they enter false data, which gives you the impression that your website has received multiple viewings from the spamming website. Again, you are expected to get curious and click on this site to check out what it’s about. Thus, traffic is generated, their popularity skyrockets and so does their ranking. While this seems like a naïve approach on behalf of the spammers, the scale, at which it is often conducted, makes it worthwhile. After all, you are only one of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of other website owners, who have undergone the same procedure. Even if only a certain percentage of these people click on the site to see what’s going on – that’s already a fat number.
As far as harmfulness goes, though, ghost spam like Lifehacĸer.com is pretty harmless. All it does is affect your stats in GA, it cannot impact anything else, like your actual traffic count for example. But over time the gap between your real statistics and the ones that include the spam from Lifehacĸer.com will only grow and will eventually result in a completely unrealistic picture. This should be important to you if you wish for your website to prosper, as how else would you otherwise be able to adequately attune to your audience? Therefore, it is paramount that you do not allow the referral spammers to continue polluting your stats.
That, however, does not mean giving into panic and making rash, foolish decisions in this regard. One of these misled decisions you could possible make, especially if you spend enough time researching the topic and reading about it on forums and whatnot, it employing the Referral Exclusion list. This is fundamentally a wrong approach. That list was not made to battle referral spam and if you use it exactly for that purpose, you will get yourself into even more trouble. By entering the spammers into that list you will basically be asking GA to go and check out the source of the visits. Since, as pointed out above, there were no real visits to begin with, GA will get confused and for no better option will mark them as traffic. So from now on, future visits will also be marked as traffic. As a result, you will not only have a distorted statistical image, you will also be paying for traffic you don’t have. Use the removal guide we’ve provided on this page to solve this issue and consider upgrading your hosting service for better protection against spam.
Block Lifehacĸer.com Spam in Google Analytics
Instruction #1: Enter your Analytics account.
After that load Admin and then – All Filters.
Instruction #2: After that, hit New Filter.
Next, add Lifehacĸer.com in the Filter Name value.
Instruction #3. Choose the Custom Filter Type.
Once you see the Filter Field, go with Campaign Source.
Next, when you see the Filter Pattern text box, enter Lifehacĸer.com. Confirm by clicking the Save button you will see at the bottom.
How to block Lifehacĸer.com referrer spam using your .htaccess file
If you are aware of a way to access your .htaccess file, you will just have to write the code below in there:
## SITE REFERRER BANNING
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} Lifehacĸer.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} Lifehacĸer.com
RewriteRule .* – [F]
In case you are not aware of a way to access it, follow these instructions:
Access your cPanel account,
the go to File Manager.
After that you should mark the check-box ‘Document Root for’.
Then go to your webpage.
Another important tip: choose ‘Show hidden Files’.
After that select Go.
Look for the .htacess file.
Once you find it, right–click it.
From the options that appear, select Code Edit.
Enter the code above and Save Changes.
Hopefully, we have been helpful! Tell us in the comment section. We will be glad to read what your opinion is!
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