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My Google Analytics shows traffic from Russia and shows lifehacker.com as traffic referral. Traffic appears throughout the day and it shows no pages visited. Any ideas for this issue?
Just realized, it is actually coming from lifehacĸer.com (letter ĸ not k), which appears to be some sort of analytics spam. How can I block this?
Just ignore them, they spoof HTTP header all the time, may be you will block one today with GA filter option, next day, 10 other spam sites will ping you. I have seen them from past years, there is no any permanent solution to block all bad bots.
Recently they was used social button or something like domain name, but now they are using popular website name like lifehacker, Google etc, because they are getting more clicks now a days with that domain names.
They are doing it, because you visit that URL, and when you will visit, it will redirect to some top affliate website like amazon or waltmort or any popular sites on your country, so your cookies will stored in browser, and when you purchase something on that site, they will get some commission. They are targeting webmaster because they often buy something online than any normal user. I know may be you'll not going to buy something, but they might get 0.5% CR(Conversation Ratio - means out of 200 people may be 1 guy will purchase something) by using this technique, they don't have to pay for paid traffics they even don't need to create any website to sell something, hence many of blackhat people moving to this technique.
The only solution is, If affliate or advertising network bann them permanently. GA team have not done anything from past 1 year, they already know the problem. But any analytics tool always grab information from HTTP headers, and blackhat guy spoof them everytime with new domain name, so just ignore them, do not waste your time by setup filters in GA every time.
First you have to Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab >> Click Filters on the right side in the VIEW section.
Then Click the + ADD FILTER button to create new filter.
Add Spam Bot lifehacĸer.com or something you can easily remember as the Filter Name.
Select the Custom Filter Type.
In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add lifehacĸer.com and Click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage.
Filtering it in Google Analytics won't solve the problem - it will just mask it. Bot will still continue to visit your site, burn your bandwidth, execute your scripts, loads ads your on your pages etc. The solution is to block the bot entirely from your site.
