Petitions.Whitehouse.Gov Google Analytics Spam: How to remove it
Hello again Google Analytics warriors!
I’m sure some of you, like me, have already been seeing the latest Vitaly Popov attack on your Google Analytics accounts: referral traffic with a referring domain of “petitions.whitehouse.gov”
Basically, it’s just one more way Mr Popov is trying to get “revenge” against Google for revoking his AdSense account back in the early 2010s.
What’s happening is that he is sending fake traffic signals to blocks of Google UA codes with this link (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/petition-ban-googles-blatant-suppression-free-speech) as the source, which makes petitions.whitehouse.gov, a completely valid site, the referring domain. This might SEEM like a good thing, if you aren’t looking deeper. “Hey!” you might say to yourself, “I’m getting good quality backlinks!” But there’s a darker side.
The traffic is going to usually be mobile, it’ll usually appear to come from Samara, Russia as the location, and will come with about a 2–5 minute time on site + a 100% bounce rate. So if you don’t get ahead of this quickly, it WILL damage your data.
In order to get rid of this, and many other spam signals, make sure you’re following anti-spam processes like these, especially a host name filter, which resolves 99% of spam traffic issues.
I have to say, I’m actually a little impressed with the clarity of commentary on this one, but at the end of the day, Vitaly Popov remains the biggest enemy of digital marketers and web data everywhere.
Keep fighting for clean data, everyone!
