Welcome reader to our Vitaly Rules referral spam removal guide. This page is dedicated to eradicating it from your Google Analytics statistics.
If you’re Google Analytics are showing some strange website visits and you’ve found out that your website is being targeted by Vitaly Rules referral spam, you have definitely come to the right place. On this page you will find out about what Vitaly Rules is and what exactly it’s doing to your site. But most importantly, we will provide you with an effective solution to this problem – our removal guide. In it you will find step-by-step instructions that will walk you through the process of blocking Vitaly Rules and those behind it. But before you scroll down to the guide, we recommend you read the information presented here. It may prove important to you in the future.
What is Vitaly Rules? What does it want?
Vitaly Rules is a form of referral spam, more specifically known as ghost spam. It targets website users with the intention of promoting another website. How does this work? Let us explain. First off, it’s important to distinguish two type of referral spam: classic referral spam and the type you are dealing with now – ghost spam. The former would be used to send bots and crawlers over to various websites, thus creating traffic for them. However, the visits would be very brief, with practically no time session. The point of this was to prompt the website owner of administrator to click back on this mysterious visitor. In doing so, the website owner would be generating traffic for another website, perhaps without even realizing it. And this is practiced on a very large scale, so hundreds of thousands of websites can end up targeted. As a result, even if a small percentage of those people pay this website a return visit back, they will already substantially be boosting its ranking and benefiting its owners.
Now, not so long ago, Google was able to put a stop to all this, hunting down classic referral spam almost to extinction. It’s very rare nowadays. In its stead ghost spam appeared, which shares the same objective only uses slightly different mechanisms to achieve its goal. So, as opposed to its predecessor, ghost spam like Vitaly Rules doesn’t rely on any bots or crawlers at all. it actually skips the part where it has to visit your website altogether and goes directly for your GA stats. It manipulates them into displaying fake views, which never occurred, from the spamming website. As most website owners are genuinely invested in their sites, they tend to often monitor their stats and keep track of the data they provide. So, naturally, when you see a bunch of views from a single site with 100% bounce rate, you will probably get curious as to what this website is about and what it might have been doing on yours. And again the same scenario follows: you click back on the site, that generates traffic for it and the spammers are happy.
While this practice isn’t malicious and will not harm your site or actual traffic count, it’s still not something you would want hanging around. The longer you allows Vitaly Rules to keep on meddling with your GA stats, the falser they will become and eventually you will lose perspective of your audience. This should be important to you and for this reason we recommend addressing the issue as quickly as possible with the help of the below guide.
Do not by any means resort to the Referral Exclusion list, which is what many internet users might suggest to you on forums and such. Suggesting this clearly says that the person has now idea how GA works. If you were to enter Vitaly Rules in the referral exclusion list, this will not only not help, but it will make matters substantially worse. What’s more, Google Analytics will be forced to mark these views from the spamming website as actual traffic, because they never really happened to begin with. So GA won’t see them as spam! This will result in you having to pay for traffic that never so much as looked your way. We cannot stress enough, how important it is that you abstain from employing the help of this tool for this exact purpose. Instead, it would be wiser to consider upgrading to a better hosting service that will provide you with better protection against spam.
Block Vitaly Rules 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 Vitaly Rules 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 Vitaly Rules. Confirm by clicking the Save button you will see at the bottom.
How to block Vitaly Rules 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} Vitaly Rules [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} Vitaly Rules
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!