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
-
Traffic exchange referral URL's
We have a client who once per month is being hit by easyihts4u.com and it is creating huge increases in their referrals. All the hits go to one page specifically. From the research we have done, this site and others like it, are not spam bots. We cannot understand how they choose sites to target and what good it does for them, or our client to have hits all on one days to one page? We created a filter in analytics to create what we think is a more accurate reflection of traffic. Should be block them at the server level as well?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
Site Scraping and Canonical Tags
Hi, So I recently found a site (actually just one page) that has scraped my homepage. All the links to my site have been removed except the canonical tag, should this be disavowed through WMT or reported through WMT's Spam Report? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | APFM0 -
Why website isn't showing on results?
Hello Moz! Just got a quick question - we have a clientcalled and for some reason they just aren't showing up in the search results. It's not a new domain and hasn't been penalised (or has reason for penalty). All the content is fresh and has no bad back links to the site. It is a new website and has been indexed by Google but for even for branded search terms, it just doesn't show up anywhere on page 1 (i think page 4). Any help or advise is great appreciated is it's doing my head in. We are using www.google.com.au. Kindest Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kymodo0 -
What's the deal with Yext?
Ok, the "SEO" in me says don't sign my clients up for this. But their ads are EVERYWHERE. All the time. Is this bad/good? thoughts? Have you ever used Yext? I can't find a review online that I don't think is biased. Should I trust my gut on this one and pass?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Switching site content
I have been advised to take a particular path with my domain, to me it seems "black hat" but ill ask the experts: Is it acceptable when one owns an exact match location domain eg london.com, to run as a tourist information site, gathering links from wikipedia,bbc,local paper/radio/sports websites etc, then after 6 - 12 months, switch the content to a business site? What could the penalties be? Please advise...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0 -
Beating the file sharing sites in SERPs - Can it be done and how?
Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right? How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0