Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
-
Hi!
My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage.
I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
-
believe I found a hint
opensiteexplorer linking pages: limboland.net
| *.limboland.net/
| Top Linking Pages | Page Authority |
| http://business.limboland.net/factoring/delaware_llc/delaware_llc.html | 29 || 39 | 281 |
Anchor text linking to some page on https://www.delawareinc.com/
| your story heidi lowe gallery,1,6 |
Query Google if the phrase with myamar girls etc is indexed for the limbo land site:
myanmar girls site:http://limboland.net/
See the smoking gun? This site links to yours and uses the exact keywords and is a doubtful site at best.
I would disavow this entire website.
Hope this helps.
Gr Daniel
-
Thanks for all the advice and help! I'm still digging, but I noticed that our PPC ads are surfacing on pages that are on SERPs for those particular terms. It may be some kind of wonky Analytics tracking.
-
Hate to quit but without any specifics it's not sensible to search more thorough and I would like to second the remark by Marks Ginsberg. But if you do I would love to take another look into it. Nothing like some could old investigating I always say.
-
I got nothing :D... sorry..
-
Unfortunately, no. Thank you for investigating though!
-
Does this query contain any site you might know?
-
Can you give us the URL of the site in question to take a peek ourselves - I'm know rather curious about what is going on here
-
Thanks, Keri! I did a fetch and the code looks fine. Still searching...
-
Thanks Mark and Daniel! I'll give it a go in OSE. I've been sticking to Analytics and GWT but it seems like it's time to branch out.
-
Thanks, Keri! I couldn't find anything via this method or good old fashioned search. It's a bit baffling that Analytics says it's coming from search when I can't find any results in search.
-
If your using WordPress I believe there is a way to exclude keywords so your site doesn't show up for certain keywords.
-
dns and domain hijack? Mm... Then I would advice to hire a security expert. Not a SEO.
-
That was actually the first thing I did when I was going to answer, but I didn't feel educated enough to answer the question. The correlation I could find is there is a company that publishes a news paper by the same name (the other companies name is an exact match on their domain name) that has written articles about Myanmar, but I don't know if that would influence anything since they do not have links on the page. If so, this is an area of SEO I haven't explored before.
-
The OP stated that these are keywords drawing traffic to the site, not referral traffic. Therefore, people are typing these keywords into a search engine and finding the site directly via the keywords.
It could be that the search engines are seeing a hacked version of the site that visitors don't see. Look at the landing pages for these keywords, then fetch those pages as Googlebot from Google Webmaster Tools.
-
yes but that's to easy and where is the fun in it:-) But could also fast become a case of chasing ghosts and shadows it it originates from websites with millions of pages?
-
So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:
site:mysite.com badkeyword
and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.
-
Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.
You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.
Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.
Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.
Sincerely,
Mark
-
Do suspicious domains show up in referring domains in the opensiteexplorer? Also if you connect the moz pro dash with Analytics it will start to pick up on landing pages receiving traffic. These would eventually show up as landing pages? But then they would somethimes need a keyword provided by Google. That could take a while.
And if not they must surely be logged on the webserver log files?
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
-
How to Increase US traffic for other GEO based website
Can you help me to understand why my traffic from the US is not increasing for landing pages/product pages whereas for our blog it has grown 2X to 3X past 2 quarters? I am afraid that I don't get any right answer for this. Could you or someone help me to discover the answer? Also, what should I do to rank in the US for a particular KW, we rank on 2 positions for KW "Hackathon" in India but for the US the no is 56. I don't understand what to do and the best possible way to rank in the US.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Keywords Ranking Fluctuate
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a client’s website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda/ Penguin update because of some spammy links. We have analysed and disavow sapmmy links edit anchor tag and landing pages. We've made a decent climb back while working on it keywords ranking was improved some of them are from out of 500 to top 30, but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords are again dropping and traffic is gone: I notice keyword ranking is dropping and some of the keywords which are on 2 and 3 page, now on 9<sup>th</sup> page. And also traffic is down. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, S
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShaunPhilips0 -
Massive rank drop on one particular keyword
As all other marketeers do I follow closely my keywords, one particular keyword has ranked continually at #2 and has suddenly dropped to +#60, but all others remain the same. We are a fairly large site in terms of numbers 9m views annually, could it be possible that someone has black hatted that particular keyword, and if so how do I find out how and more importantly who?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sususu0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
My Site having a drop in traffic with eash passing month
Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | intelmixx0 -
Are links from directories good or bad?
I've done a lot of competitive link analysis lately and found that a lot of my competitors links for a certain keyword are coming from low quality directory sites and they're outranking my site. This leads me to my question which may or may not have an answer(I at least hope it fuels a good discussion)... Are links from directory sites good or bad for SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TylerReardon0 -
What are good sources to buy traffic and video views?
I am looking into buying traffic for a website and I'd like to know if anyone has had a positive experience doing so. What are the best companies that sell traffic? I also want to buy video views. This is a trickier question. I upload the videos to YouTube and use the embed code on my website. I want the paid video views on my site so I get the traffic and YT gets the video view. Any suggestions? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Storitz0