Block unwanted traffic
-
Hello everyone,
I have started developing a website about 45 days ago. I have noticed that I'm receiving traffic from adult websites. I've been tracking the traffic via GA. I have not started my link build process yet, but I'm still receiving about 15 to 30 visits per day from these websites.
I've had this domain name without use for about 5 years. The domain name was originally registered in 1998. I don't have a background on the previous owners so I wouldn't know their SEO practice.
What's the best practice to block this traffic? Google has yet to index the domain by the brand keyword. I feel the referring traffic could be affecting my SERPs.
Bing has already index the site and started referring traffic by the brand keyword. Yes, the brand keyword is on the domain name (brandkeyword.com).
Thanks in advanced.
-
I completely agree with Patrick. I can't reiterate enough, before you start blocking traffic make sure you do your research. For example semalt, a well known "spider" seems to send fake visits. Before you actually block anything, it might be worth just filtering analytics to get a true analytics of traffic.
I try and view blocking/disavow as a last ditch effort. They will have the most drastic impact.
Patrick included some great links, I highly suggest checking them out.
-
Hi there
I would check Google's Report spam, paid links, malware, and other problems and see if you this is a route you should take. I would also do a backlink audit and check which links you should reach out to for removal. You can also add suspicious links to your disavow file.
Here's a great guide to remove this from your Analytics traffic and, although I have never tried this, here's some tips to block traffic from these spam sites. I would use caution on that though and consult your web dev team.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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 buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Large traffic loss, how to resolve?
So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed. We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+ - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make? What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here. Await your replys thanks. 3BCQNi3
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help. The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'. The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats. Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated. George 7vprsJo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrinvaleBird0 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month
Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Direct Traffic has Dropped 48% to Last Year
Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices. Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else? Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice? Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note: Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped. In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds. We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited. In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images. We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic. Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue. Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimmyFritz1 -
Thinking of redirecting *all* mobile traffic to another site (via an advertiser) - safe to do?
Hi, I am thinking of redirecting all mobile (iphone, cell phone, etc) to an advertiser (so completely different content than my site). Is there any risk of getting banned from google (etc) for doing this? (this is for an adult site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dmn020 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0