GOOGLE ANALYTIC SKEWED DATA BECAUSE OF GHOST REFERRAL SPAM ND CRAWL BOTS
-
Hi Guys,
We are having some major problems with our Google Analytics and MOz account. Due to the large number of ghost/referral spam and crawler bots we have added some heavy filtering to GA. This seems to be working protecting the data from all these problems but also filtering out much needed data that is not coming through. In example, we used to get a hundred visitors a day at the least and now we are down to under ten.
ANYBODY PLEASE HELP. HAVE READ THROUGH MANY ARTICLES WITH NO FIND TO PERMANENT SOLID SOLUTION (even willing to go with paid service instead of GA)
Thank You so Much,
S.M.
-
As I understand, you get referral traffic from websites like; traffic-cash and those with .xyz extension.
There is a great article on how to filter those: https://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/
-
I wonder what kind of bots or crawlers you were seeing before because we have millions of visitors in our analytics set-ups, no filters to filter them out and we barely see any traffic coming from browsers or hostnames that may be identified as such.
-
You may have already tried this (https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam) as I believe it is one of the more common articles, but it suggests setting up a filter to use hostnames and testing it with a segment. This has worked well for us. You have to be careful and make sure you use ALL the relevant hostnames and that your expression doesn't contain errors.
-
What filters do you have setup?
Generally, I prefer to set up two views on an Analytics property, one containing all of the data, and one with filters. This way if the filtered data is looking lower than expected, there's still the complete view to compare against. It also makes it easy to test the efficacy of the filters that were created.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Youtube traffic page url referral
Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?
Moz Pro | | xeonet320 -
Rogerbot's crawl behaviour vs google spiders and other crawlers - disparate results have me confused.
I'm curious as to how accurately rogerbot replicates google's searchbot I've currently got a site which is reporting over 200 pages of duplicate/titles content in moz tools. The pages in question are all session IDs and have been blocked in the robot.txt (about 3 weeks ago), however the errors are still appearing. I've also crawled the page using screaming frog SEO spider. According to Screaming Frog, the offending pages have been blocked and are not being crawled. Webmaster tools is also reporting no crawl errors. Is there something I'm missing here? Why would I receive such different results. Which one's should I trust? Does rogerbot ignore robot.txt? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | KJDMedia0 -
Was there another issue crawling rankings on 9th October?
Again this month I don't appear to have rankings logged for 9th October. Was there an issue earlier in the month?
Moz Pro | | NathanP0 -
Google Inbound Links much higher than SEOMOZ
I just started here and really like everything the community and tools so far. One question. My SEOMOZ dashboard shows only one inbound link while Google Web Tools shows 300+. My site has been up for 3 months now and I'm curious about the lack of indexing. Any help, tips or feedback is greatly appreciated. http://CrossTrainingandFitness.com Robb Jarrett
Moz Pro | | carbbon0 -
Moz crawling
Hi Everyone! I'm new to the SEOMoz and wanted to find out if there is a way to decrease the waiting time for the campaign crawl. I have made a lot of changes based on the first crawl and would like to see how these are reflected on the reports, but can't until the next crawl is performed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | coremediadesign0 -
Can you change crawl day of week?
Can I somehow sync the day of the week for each of my campaigns' crawls, so that all campaigns are updated on the same day?
Moz Pro | | ATShock0 -
SEOmoz crawl error questions
I just got my first seomoz crawl report and was shocked at all the errors it generated. I looked into it and saw 7200 crawl errors. Most of them are duplicate page titles and duplicate page content. I clicked into the report and found that 97% of the errors were going off of one page It has ttp://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20 http://legendzelda.net/forums/index.php/members/page__sort_key__joined__sort_order__asc__max_results__20__quickjump__A__name_box__begins__name__A__quickjump__E etc Has 20 pages of slight variations of this link. It is all my members list or a search of my members list so it is not really duplicate content or anything. How can I get these errors to go away and make search my site is not taking a hit? The forum software I use is IPB.
Moz Pro | | NoahGlaser780 -
Traffic Data Lag
Today is 8/29/11. Why does my traffic data still show data from 8/8/11? It says last data update 8/15/11 but there is no 8/15 data showing. I should be able to view 8/22 by now. This is way behind. I'm a newbie so hook me up. What am I missing? It was updating every Monday but not anymore.
Moz Pro | | ranger001