Having to face Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov referral spam is certainly not a pleasant experience. And especially if this is your first time to have come across this sort of online nuisance, we can imagine your head must be swarming with different questions. Well, that’s what we’re here for. Moreover, this article will not only explain what exactly it is that you’ve encountered, we will also tell you about a common mistake people usually make with referral spam. In addition to that, we will give you a useful tip that will help you protect your website from future problems of this kind. But more importantly, we will provide you with a set of instructions to aid you in removing Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov from your life and blocking the spammers. For that purpose you will find our removal guide just below the article on this page.
What is referral spam? How harmful is it?
Let’s give you a brief history lesson – it will make understanding referral spam and Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov a lot easier. First of all, it’s important to make the distinction between the type of referral spam that Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov belongs to and its predecessor – classic referral spam. You are currently faced with ghost spam. The older, less common nowadays version employed the use of bots and crawlers to as to spam other websites. The spammers would send them out to the large number of targeted sites, much like your own, and would initiate multiple visits on them. As a result, the website owners will wake up the next day to check their statistics and would notice a strange thing. There would be several views from a certain website, but the funny thing is – they never lasted even so much as a second. So, naturally, this would spark their curiosity and they would click to see what this strange visiting website is all about. In that, those owners or admins will have fulfilled the spammers’ wish. They will have generated traffic for the spamming site. Clever, right?
Well, at some point the experts over at Google were able to come up with a way to stop this activity. That’s why today it would be rather unusual for you to come across classic referral spam. But in its stead came ghost spam. So, not much changed: the goal stayed the same, even the principle of functioning didn’t really change. Only one thing did – the use of the bots and crawlers. In fact, it was completely annihilated and instead of doing that, the spammers directly affect your Google Analytics stats. So, to someone like you, a website owner, the effect would still be the same – on the outside at least. You will still check your stats to find numerous visits from a strange site. The only things is, the visits never happened and your traffic count is not affected. So, to answer the question from the subheading – Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov isn’t all that harmful. The worst that can happen is that over time it will start distorting your stats to the point where you will no longer have an accurate perspective over your website’s audience. And that’s not exactly a good thing.
But things get a lot worse, when people try to figure things out on their own and come across a tool called the Referral Exclusion list. Just because it has the word referral in it, doesn’t mean that it’s meant to deal with referral spam. If you use that list to report Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov and thus hope to have the problem solved, you’re going to be in for a very unpleasant surprise. You will actually make GA try to verify this new information you’ve given it and it will try to check out the spamming site. But guess what? Since there were no actual views on its behalf, it won’t be able to follow up on them. And as a result, it will simply mark it as legitimate traffic. And as a direct result of this, you will now end up paying for imaginary visits and will still have to keep looking at false data in your stats. To avoid this situation, simply use the instructions provided below. They contain all the necessary instructions to effectively block the spammers. And as a means of prevention, from now on you might want to employ the services of a better hosting provider.
Block Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov Google Analytics Spam
Instruction #1: Enter your Analytics account.
After that load Admin and then – All Filters.
Instruction #2: After that, hit New Filter.
Next, add Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov 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 Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov. Confirm by clicking the Save button you will see at the bottom.
How to block Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov 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} Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov
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!