If you are here I assume that you woke up this morning, and had a look at your data analytics dashboard, just like I did. We love checking out our traffic, don't we?
Then, in the GA dashboard you saw a huge spike in traffic related to "bot-traffic.icu," "bot-traffic.life," or any variation of this domain.
In this post, we will tell you what you can do about it step-by-step (plus an extra action that you can take to ensure that known bots are automatically excluded from your GA reports, at the end of the post.)
What is bot-traffic.icu and bot-traffic.life in Google Analytics?
bot-traffic.icu and bot-traffic.life is spammy non-human traffic from an unknown origin. Basically, spammers create programs that visit websites to gather intelligence. Those programs are called bots or spiders. The programs visit (or crawl) website at lightning speed, which means that the bots can crawl hundreds of webpages per second.
Spammers usually have a reason to spend energy and time on crawling your website: to contact you with a service offer, to check your content for competitors, etc. In the specific case of "bot-traffic," do not know why spammers would send unsolicited traffic to random websites. The traffic does not appear to be related to an offer nor any commercial endeavor. It does not look like a DDoS attack either. The reasons why "traffic-bot" is active are not known.
Now the question is, what can we do about it?
How to block referral SPAM Traffic like bot-traffic.icu and bot-traffic.life in Google Analytics?
Log in your Google Analytics and go to the Google Analytics Admin dashboard.
Then follow the steps below:
STEP 1
Click on "All Filters"
STEP 2
Under "Filter Name," give a name to your filter. I gave it the name: SPAM Traffic bot-traffic/.icu|trafficbot/ .life
STEP 3
Click on "Custom"
STEP 4
Click on "Exclude"
STEP 5
Select "Campaign Source"
STEP 6
Under "Filter Pattern" paste this: bot-traffic/.icu|trafficbot/ .life
This will block both domain extensions .icu and .life. The spammers are using different variations...
STEP 7
Scroll down and click on "Save."
Et voilà!
How to stop SPAM bots in Google Analytics: Bot Filtering Setting
STEP 1
Click on "View Settings"
STEP 2
Tick the "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" (This should already be ticked... if it is not, then we recommend that you tick it)
Can I remove the SPAM bot data from Google Analytics?
You can request Google to unlist the spammy traffic in your account. I am not sure to what extent Google execute those requests. One thing is sure, on the short term, your traffic data is skewed. You may find workarounds by excluding the bot data from your report.
What did you do to solve the data issue?
Feel free to reach out to me via Facebook.
Let us know if this post was helpful to you!
If you are interested in learning more about SEO:
- 20,000 words masterpiece DIY SEO (Do It Yourself SEO)
- Get SEO clients How to Get SEO Clients: The (Astonishingly Simple) Step-by-Step Method