Semalt: What is I Love Vitaly Referral Spam In Google Analytics?

1. 23.05.2018 Semalt: What is ILoveVitaly Referral Spam In Google Analytics? The plague of ghost spam and referral spam to hit the World Wide Web consists of a new malware – ILoveVitaly. Just like priceg, darodar, blackhatworth, and cenoval, this referral spam consists of strategies to create false page views. It tricks your Google Analytics account in a lot of ways and tries to get you lots of traf?c through random tracking IDs. It aims to weaken your website's credibility on the internet and performs a variety of suspicious activities. If you search Bing, Yahoo or Google, you may ?nd hundreds to thousands of reports of websites that have spam and fake links, and the data of those sites are changed every day. It would not be wrong to say that almost all sites are ?ghting for a de?nitive solution as they want to get rid of the referral spam as soon as possible. Nik Chaykovskiy, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, provides here a handy solution in this regard. Introduction to ILoveVitaly Spam In light of the above, we are going to give a brief introduction of ILoveVitaly spam. A lot of debates are already there regarding the ways to block the suspicious and harmful links. Various controversies have been taking place on the internet. Thankfully, Google has introduced a couple of strategies to remove referral spam from your Analytics https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1654.html 1/2

2. 23.05.2018 account without disturbing your ranking in the search engines. Referral spam is not a new term, as experts have explained it a lot of times in recent months. Mainly, it is a form of spam that involves various attempts to target your web pages. The hackers mainly try to trick your Google Analytics account to damage your site's rank and to improve their own site's rank in the search engine results. ILoveVitaly makes use of your site's tracking IDs for sending speci?c data to your Google Analytics account. This tracking ID consists of lots of viruses and malware and is basically there to decrease the quality of your web content. Moreover, this spam tricks the users and gets them trapped in various suspicious activities, leading them to click malicious links. Most often, the Amazon Af?liate links are where you may get trapped by the ILoveVitaly spam. Is it Dangerous for My Website? It would not be wrong to say that the referral spam is hazardous to all websites and blogs. It leaves negative impacts on your Google Analytics report, and you will view false views in your account. Reporting it to Google is not enough as you have to create ?lters too. The spamming links can hurt the quality of your traf?c, generating lots of hits and increasing your bounce rate to a great extent. Thus, we can say that the ILoveVitaly is dangerous for your website and should be gotten rid of as early as possible. How to Eliminate ILoveVitaly? As we have already mentioned that the referral spam is not real, you should remove its code from your JavaScript or the .htaccess ?les. You have to create ?lters for excluding all types of spam. Back in 2015, Google announced a few features that let the users exclude some spiders and bots from their Google Analytics data. It is possible to eliminate ILoveVitaly from your account by creating a variety of ?lters for different websites. Fighting Ghost Referrals If you notice spam and referral links in the Google Analytics report, you should be worried as the traf?c being directed to your site is fake. Fighting ghost referrals on a regular basis is essential. For this, you should check Google's updated policies and tips to project your analytic data. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1654.html 2/2