Referral Spam
-
Seem to be getting an awful lot of referral spam (Very large percentage), does it cause a problem with SEO or do search engines ignore it?
Is it likely to have a negative effect?
Is it a type of commercial warfare by competitors?
Does anyone have any direct experience or knowledge?
Thanks
-
According to Google, they don't use any Google Analytics related data for rankings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
Is it a type of commercial warfare by competitors?
No, it's spam, which is targeted towards your curiosity - "oh, I got this visit from this website. Let me check it out".
The only negative effect is polluting your GA reports and data. Fortunately, there is a way to setup filters and block all ghost and referral spam. Here is an article - https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
About experience with it - yes, I have been fighting it for quite long time by now and what I see is that the amount of referral and ghost spam to our website grows like crazy, however rankings are not affected at all. At least, they are growing, accordingly to our SEO work.
-
This is an issue an increasing amount of people are having. To anwer your questions:
- This spam does not hurt your SEO. Most of these are "ghost referrals", meaning they don't actually hit your server, but only show up in analytics. It will not influence how well you will do in search engines, it's merely a pain in the behind when trying to accurately track incoming traffic to your site.
- I'd recommend filtering them out within google analytics via hostname instead.
- Refer to this great moz post regarding this very issue to ensure your issue is taken care of: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
-
You're certainly not the only one dealing with that issue.
Fortunately it doesn't negatively impact your rankings but it sure does mess with Analytics.
Jared Gardner did a great post on just this subject that covers why it exists and more importantly, how you can block it right here on the Moz site at https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
And it's probably good to know too that if it's the subject of that type of article ... you're not alone. You know ... because misery loves company.
Hope that helps !
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
-
Spam score
sir my blog is getting 40% spam score please guide me how can i decrease it please
Technical SEO | | seotoolshero230 -
Why my spam score is 1%?
hello I do white hat SEO on my site and I Don't do any spamy job on my site but my spam score is 1%.
Technical SEO | | zacharrivers
please look at my site and tell me what can I do to decrease it to 0. https://rayastor.ir/ this is my site.0 -
Disavow links and domain of SPAM links
Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2. Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png
Technical SEO | | ahming7770 -
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade
Hoping someone can help. I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help. We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though). Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News. Sequence of Events: 1. Dec. 13 launch 2. Google news referral traffic stopped 3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News. 4. Retested sitemap When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors. When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP Yet, still no google news referral traffic. Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml Can someone help? We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic. Would love an early Christmas present. Thanks!! Lisa
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Referrals from widget domains
Let's say you are doing seo for a company that sells 5000 widgets. Let's call their site www.mainsite.com ... They have already set up ( purchased ) many domains such as www.widget1.com which is one of the widgets they have on their main site. so they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains? Would it be : Have those pages be landing pages with content and pictures and optimized with a link to their main site widget page? Or have that domain have a 301 redirect to go their main site, to the particular page showing that widget for sale off their main site? Miscellaneous sidebar question - Since both the main site widget page and the widget domain might be in competition and might have duplicate content, what are the ramifications of not using the canonical tag, and what other considerations might there be? How much must be duplicate content before considering using the canonical tag?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
Removing inbound Spam Links
Hello, Last February one of my clients websites was delisted. It turns out that some time ago that had attempted to launch a social network along time lines of ning. The project had fallen apart of the was still up. At some point spammers found it and started using it as part of a link farm. Once it was discovered, the subdomain it was posted on was removed and the website returned to search within 2 weeks. Last week, the website disappeared again OSE shows that in the last 2 months the website has got 2000 (There are about 16,000 total spam links) additional spam links now pointing and the root domain. On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting about 15,000 404 errors. I have blocked Google from crawling the path where the path were the spam pages used to be. If there a way to block the 1000s of inbound spam links?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0