Controlling Referrer Spam

How to remove this annoying query from your Google Analytics and Google Search Console reports.

I made a request to remove my page: https://www.tempusfugit.me.uk/topics.html, my intention was to remove this permenantly. Google tell me that If I make a (temporary) Removal Request and remove the file from my server it will become permenant, Apparently this is not the case.

The occurance of the query in the Google reports is puzzling as Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and has been banned from Twitter and Facebook. The talk of Russian interferrance in politics has become an issue from the past (or is it?). I can't really see the point of Vitaly Popov's efforts apart from the fact that he can.

At the present time I have 9 impresssions for this nonsense for a page that does not exist on my server!

The searches that I expect to see are: "pro-trump spammer over the letter g" and variations of the page title. These are some of the theories that I have about turning Impressions into Clicks

/en_us/article/google-wins-legal-battle-against-pro-trump-spammer-over-the-letter-g

I originally had the title of this page as "Referrer Spam" (it is still the name of the URL).

I have now used the query itself as the title of the page as I am sure that it will be something that other webmasters would have seen and would be very interested in working out how to get rid of it from their reports.

At the present time I am a little non-plussed to understand how Vitaly does this and the "loop-hole" that seems to be part of Google's reporting system. I have made many searches myself but have yet to come up with a satisfying solution to the problem.

A theory how he gets the query to appear in your reports

This is based a bit on "chicken and egg" thinking. The initial "hook" into one or more of your pages seems to relate to a topic that the person in question, one one doing the spamming, is interested in. The search query in this case does not match anything you have on your page - this is still perplexing.

If you are a webmaster and you have noticed this spam then it is more than likely if you post about it you are likely to use the spammers name and the query that you see in your reports. When you do this it is a simple matter for the spammer to make searches for his name and the query you are reporting. All this does is to attract more spam!

This page and the page linked first in my links section on this page fall into that criteria. You could comment by modifying the spammers name and the search query then it would be unlikely to be found. A "Catch-22".

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External Sources

Controlling Referrer Spam