Semalt: What is ILoveVitaly Referral Spam In Google Analytics?

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

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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.

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