How to Block motherboard.vice.com Fake Traffic Referral in Google Analytics

You may wonder why are we talking about blocking motherboard.vice.com referral? Well, if you are among those bloggers who have been receiving traffic from this referral for no reason, you might be trying to find where is the link to your site from this website. Before we go ahead to explain, let me tell you what this site is all about.

What is motherboard.vice.com?

Vice.com is a website that publishes articles on various topics, tech, fashion, travel, sports, etc.. Motheboard.vice.com is a dedicated subdomain of Vice.com where you will find only technology related articles.

Why am I receiving Traffic from motherboard.vice.com?

Most of the times, all the website link to a specific article if they include some written material from your website. So if you are receiving traffic to an article, it will be limited for a few days, and you will be able to see what article is getting traffic. However, if you are receiving continuous traffic to your Home Page, and the visitor from the source doesn’t visit any other page, that means that’s not real traffic, but Bot.

Getting traffic from an unknown website where your website link doesn’t exist could be surprising. It is usually done by some spammers who don’t have enough traffic to their website. They do this to get webmasters’ attention. When you see a visitor coming from a website, you do visit that website to find out where is your website link. This way they get visitors to their sites.

Why should I block Fake Referral like motherboard.vice.com?

Getting so many visitors may sound awesome, and you may not want to block it. But, such fake traffic increases the bounce rate, and destroy the analytics data. The bounce rate from such traffic will be 100% because the visitor leaves your website from your home page. That’s the primary reason, you should block such traffic in analytics. If you are running Adsense, fake traffic may lead in blocking your Adsense account. If someone is driving fake traffic using Bot, you cannot stop them, but blocking such referral will help you getting your Adsense account back if something happens.

How to Block motherboard.vice.com traffic referral via Google Analytics?

• Visit Analytics.Google.Com via your computer’s internet browser.
• Click on Admin option.
• Now select your account, then website property, and then click on Filter option.

• Click on +Add Filter option.

• Now type motherboard.vice.com in Filter Name field.
• Select Custom as Filter Type.
• Select Campaign Source as Filter Field.
• Type motherboard.vice.com in Filter Pattern.

• Now scroll down, and you will find Save option on the bottom. Click on Save to apply filter settings, and you are done.
• If you are checking real-time traffic report in Analytics, motherboard.vice.com may still appear, but those traffic will not increase. Wait for 5 minutes, and it will disappear, and will never come back until you remove the filter.

How to Enable Exclusion of Traffic from Known Bots and Spiders in Google Analytics?

• Under Google Analytics, click on Admin option.
• Select Account and Website Property, and click on Settings

• Now enable the option Bot Filtering.

Can I Block Filter Ghost Spam Traffic Referral or Source like motherboard.vice.com via .htaccess file?

Blocking referral is possible from .htaccess as well, and the code may have looked like this;

# Ban Spam Referrals

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} unblockedgames.blogbucket.org [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} unblockedgames.blogbucket.org

RewriteRule .* - [F]

However, if you add this code to .htaccess file, it won’t work. So there is no need to waste time behind this.