News How to Handle the Spike in Referral Spam Traffic from Poland

Recent spikes of spam referral traffic from Poland and Uzbekistan have shed light on a new method for spam attacks where they're targeting your website’s GA4 tag directly. Webmasters and digital marketers have been scrambling to stop this fraudulent traffic from affecting their Google Analytics accounts. Despite receiving numerous support tickets requesting help filtering out this spam traffic, Google remains silent on this issue.

A few suggested solutions are floating around attempting to resolve this issue. Based on our research, each of these solutions for the GA4 referral traffic spike functions as more of a bandaid than an absolute fix. That said, our recommendation forward is to leverage a solution that is the most effective and takes the least amount of time to deploy. 

Our recommendation is to set up an exclusion within another Google property, Google Tag Manager, to block the offending domains from reaching your GA4 tag.

You can find step-by-step instructions for this solution in this article.

Contact Trial Guides Digital Marketing for any assistance or questions pertaining to implementing this solution.

• Domains:

  • News.grets.store

  • Kar.razas.site

  • Info.seders.website

  • Game.fertuk.site

  • Ofer.bartikus.site

  • Trast.mantero.online

  • Garold.dertus.site

  • Static.seders.website

• IP Addresses:

  • 54.149.229.186

  • 44.237.81.149

  • 54.148.22.225

  • 54.186.203.133

  • 38.180.120.84

  • 77.222.40.224

  • 45.140.19.173

• Next best solution: 

  • Filter the Offending IP Addresses 

  • Issues: The attacks are coming directly to the GA4 tag associated with your website. Once identified, filtering their IP only slows them down. They’re able to change their IP addresses and avoid your filter, starting an endless cat-and-mouse game you don’t have time for. This site has been on top of updating the list of offending IP addresses. If you choose this solution be sure to regularly check for new IP addresses producing referral spam traffic from Poland.

• Alternative solution:

  • Delete and Re-establish Your Google Tag

  • Issues: This task is not all that quick or easy when making sure your historical data is not lost. However, this solution only delays the attackers similar to the IP filter. If you are seeing this spam traffic then they have identified your GA4 tag. No longer using that specific tag only saves you from spam traffic until they identify your new GA4 tag number. 

• Common Suggestion to Avoid:

  • List the Offending Domains via Unwanted Referrals

  • Issues: Listing the domains under this setting only removes the “referral” designation and reclassifies that “referral” traffic as “direct” traffic. This suggestion does not function as a solution at all. 

We understand there may still be challenges, and this approach might not suit everyone’s needs. Here is more information that we found in the Google Support Forums from users with the same issue.

If you’ve also experienced an unexpected increase in referral traffic recently, we hope this advice has been beneficial!