I want to stop invalid referral traffic to my site coming from malicious subdomain

Website, Application, Performance Security Center
20

Finally resolved this on a few of our sites. It was super confusing until digging into it a bit more.

It seems this is a case of “Referral Spam” as the traffic was never hitting the server directly (or Cloudflare). This article has a great graphic that explains it better than I can: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-filter-referral-spam-google-analytics/388480/.

A lot of the guides for filtering out Referral Spam are outdated. This is how I set it up via Google Analytics:

  1. In your GA dashboard, click Admin (bottom left in my view - with the Gear icon)
  2. Go to Data Streams (in the Data collection and modification section)
  3. Click your site
  4. At the bottom, under ‘Google Tag’, click Configure Tag Settings
  5. At the bottom, click “Show More”
  6. Click “List Unwanted Referrals”
  7. Click Add Condition and enter news.grets . store (without spaces)
  8. Click save

NOTE - this change will not be immediate. For me, it took about 2 days.

There’s going to be a delay for when this takes effect in your property. This is due to GA’s session expiration for a known User/Session/Referrer that has already hit your GA property.

Since there’s already bs traffic from this Grets thing in my reports, I just apply a filter in any view to show me results where “Refferer does not contain news.grets . store” (without spaces).

I can certainly give an example on how to apply a vilter, but I figured the more pressing thing was putting in the setting to ignore referral Spam from this host.

I hope this helps someone else.

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