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
-
Is the Moz Spam Score a reliable detection of PBNs?
Hello Moz community I am looking at a couple of websites to guest post on and it feels almost too easy. I am concerned these sites may be part of a PBN. Their spam scores are quite low however (6% - 11%). Is the new Spam Score on Link Explorer (not Open Site Explorer) a reliable tool to vet PBNs? I asked a member of the Moz team but they didn't know. Perhaps another will. Here is the website http://www.dspacecloud.org/ Thank you in advance for your opinions.
Moz Pro | | Avid-Panda0 -
Links to Your Site: No Data Available in Google Search Console
The site I am working on did not have their site submitted to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). I submitted the site and a sitemap that auto updates. Google is crawling the site daily (about 30 pages a day). Under Search Traffic > Links to Your Site it shows no data is availible. I thought it was because it was a newly submitted site, but it has been two months now. Moz seems to have the same issue. Moz does show inbound links, but their are some that we think should really help us that are not shown. For instance, the Dallas Morning News wrote this article. They have a high DA and PA. Also, iliveindallas.com has an article about us that is still on the front page. That was a few weeks ago but also does not show up on Moz or Google SC. We are trying to be selective about the links we are getting. That they are follow links from reputable sites. Worried that both Google and Moz are not showing them.
Moz Pro | | TapGoods1 -
Is SeoMOZ Crawl Diagnostics wrong here?
We've been getting a ton of critical errors (about 80,000) in SeoMoz' Crawl Diagnostics saying we have duplicate content in our client's E-commerce site. Some of the errors are correct, but a lot of the pages are variations like: www.example.com/productlist?page=1 www.example.com/productlist?page=2 However, in our source code we have used rel="prev" and rel="next" so in my opinion we should be alright. Would love to hear from you if we have made a mistake or if it is an error in SeoMoz. Here's a full paste of the script:
Moz Pro | | Webdannmark0 -
Not provided Data in SEOMoz reports
Hi How do SeoMoz reports deal with 'not provided' data I see my total visits from organic search for a month are same as total of both my branded and non branded keyword traffic combined yet GA is reporting 157 visits from non provided data so is SEOMoz being very clever and finding a way to decipher this not provided data and allocate it accordingly in the reports ? Or if not what ? Many Thanks Dan
Moz Pro | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Rankings in Google.be - 3 languages
As the site of my customers is in 3 languages, I also want to monitor the rankings in 3 languages. I do have the possibility to monitor them in seomoz: google.be english google.be dutch google.be french However, in the report (http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/227154/rankings) I do see the 3 columns, but the title is only google.be, WITHOUT the language selection. Not really helpfull... Any advice? oNDu9
Moz Pro | | nans0 -
Why does Crawl Diagnostics report this as duplicate content?
Hi guys, we've been addressing a duplicate content problem on our site over the past few weeks. Lately, we've implemented rel canonical tags in various parts of our ecommerce store, over time, and observing the effects by both tracking changes in SEOMoz and Websmater tools. Although our duplicate content errors are definitely decreasing, I can't help but wonder why some URLs are still being flagged with duplicate content by our SEOmoz crawler. Here's an example, taken directly from our Crawl Diagnostics Report: URL with 4 Duplicate Content errors:
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
/safety-lights.html Duplicate content URLs:
/safety-lights.html ?cat=78&price=-100
/safety-lights.html?cat=78&dir=desc&order=position /safety-lights.html?cat=78 /safety-lights.html?manufacturer=514 What I don't understand, is all of the URLS with URL parameters have a rel canonical tag pointing to the 'real' URL
/safety-lights.html So why is SEOMoz crawler still flagging this as duplicate content?0 -
Campaign crawl re - schedule
Hello, On the last crawl of a website of mine, seomoz pointed out about 1500 errors (ouch!) on my site. I have made some corrections and i just want to see if they are at the right way but the next crawl is in a week. Is there any way so i can force a crawl before the scheduled date? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Tz_Seo0 -
How long does the seomoz crawl take?
It's been doing it's thing for over 48 hours now and Ive got less than 350 pages... is this norma? It's NOT the first crawl.
Moz Pro | | borderbound0