How to remove Secret.ɢoogle.com referral spam

What should you know about Secret.ɢoogle.com referral spam?

Secret.ɢoogle.com referral spam emerges in Google Analytics reports and distorts real statistics in order to draw user’s attention and convince him/her click on a hideous link. Secret.ɢoogle.com virus is known to be created by a Russian hacker Vitaly Popov, which actively advertises its site ilovevitaly.com. This spam differs from others because it does not pollute referral table, but Language section instead. The spam inserts Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump! message into this field, and provides random legitimate URLs in Hostname field. We highly recommend you to refrain yourself from visiting Secret.ɢoogle.com site because it can pollute your browser with shady cookies. If you enter the website, you must remove these tracking cookies from your browser. Now let us describe what happens once you open that website. First of all, you will notice a very long and suspicious text in the address bar, which says:

money.get.away.get.a.good.job.with.more.pay.and.you.are.okay.money.it.is.a.gas.grab.that.cash.with.bothhands.and.make.a.stash.a.new.car.caviar.four.star.daydream.think.ill.buy.me.a.football.team.money.get.back.i.am.alright.jack.ilovevitaly.com/#.keep.off.my.stack.money.it.is.a.hit.do.not.give.me.that.do.goody.good.bullshit.i.am.in.the.hifidelity.first.class.travelling.set.and.i.think.i.need.a.lear.jet.money.it.is.a.secret.%C%A2oogle.com/#.share.it.fairly.but.dont.take.a.slice.of.my.pie.money.so.they.say.is.the.root.of.all.evil.today.but.if.you.ask.for.a.rise.its.no.surprise.that.they.are.giving.none.and.secret.%C9%A2oogle.com

The web page displays a “help” window, which greets the victim with such words: “Searchshell with rich choice, Lucky button, shops and torrentz from Vitaly Popov.” The rest of the message gives an impression that the spam perpetrator Vitaly is hostile to Google and wants to take this giant company down. We hardly believe that this ridiculous spammer can ever reach this ludicrous goal. It desperately wants people to install its add-on, which is dubbed “Google Killer,” because in his opinion, Google is greedy, and it doesn’t provide relevant search results but promoted paid search results instead. He condemns the removal of “I’m feeling lucky” button and claims to be making every effort to improve users’ search experience. It is just a Session of one strange person, and you should not let it pollute your Google Analytics results. Therefore, we have prepared informative instructions on how to block Secret.ɢoogle.com referral spam (find the tutorial below the article).

Why did my Google Analytics get affected by this spam?

Referral spam relies on a technique that doesn’t actually require to visit victim’s website. Spammers use bots that do not enter your website at all but send certain information to the Google Analytics server. To put it shortly, computer geeks only need to know your UA-ID to send fake reports to your Google Analytics. Sadly, there is no easy route to go around this problem, or at least at the moment there isn’t one. Such connections typically have more or less 100% bounce rate, and 00:00:00 in avg. session duration. These are typical signs that indicate the referrer is fake and you shouldn’t try to visit the website that appears in the Source/Medium field.

How to block secret.ɢoogle.com referral spam?

To remove secret.google.com virus from your Google Analytics data, follow instructions provided below. You should remember that these fake visits mess up the accuracy of information about your website, but in reality doesn’t harm your site in any way. However, if you wish to see accurate statistics about your site and its visitors, block secret.ɢoogle.com spam with the help of this guide:

First step. Stop language spam by setting up view-level filter

First of all, you need to set up a filter that sorts out and blocks hits where the language dimension contains more than 15 chars and includes symbols that are invalid for the language field. To do this, do the following:

1. Go to Admin panel, and in the VIEW column, select Filters.
2. Here, hit New Filter button. Choose Create new Filter, and give it a name, for example, Exclude Language Spam.
3. Choose Custom Filter type, and in the Filter Field menu, select Language settings. In the Filter pattern field, type in the following: .{15,}|\s[^s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/
4. Save.

Second step. Get rid of previous spam using Advanced Segment panel

1. In Reporting tab, click Landing Pages (under Behavior section). Here, click +New Segment button.
2. Add segment name, for instance, Language Spam Fix.
3. In the Language field, select “does not match regex” and type in .{15,}|\s[^s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/ .
4. Then click Save.