Negative SEO Click Bot Lowering My CTR?
-
I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term.
Is there any way to detect this activity?
Background:
We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO.
We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves. However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term. I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only)
Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2. I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory.
Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?
-
Thanks! I figured as much, but I wanted to hear it from another guru rather than assuming on my own.
I appreciate it
-
Google do not use it in a page's ranking (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU). And since the referral spam is never actually on your site, but only activating your tracking code it shouldn't hurt you.
Besides, I don't think I've seen a site out there who hasn't been hit by referral spam. Some haven't been hit as hard, but still have seen it to some degree. Just set up some filters & segments so you can analyse on the real data. I found it very helpful to read this and this.
-
Thanks! I agree with everything you said. We'll be sure to remove and disavow any negative links.
As you can see from the images I posted above, we are getting quite a bit of referral spam that we need to address.
Any idea if the referral spam can negatively impact Google measurement of user experience / dwell time? I don't simply want to block it in analytics if it is poorly reflecting on our site.
-
Hi there
From an organic standpoint, I am really not sure - maybe someone can take a look for you there.
You could (and really should) check your referral spam (here's another resource) - from there you can remove and disavow possible links that are hurting your profile.
But again, from an organic standpoint, I am not entirely sure, and even then, I am not sure how you can prove it's malicious without hard proof.
I would focus on the links above and see what moves the needle for you. That's really the most you can do from my vantage point at the moment.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Great links Patrick!
These are all things we're constantly working on. The info on dwell time was of particular interest. Thanks!
We might be wearing tin foil hats a bit, but the past actions of the competition have unfortunately led us down that path of thinking.
Is there any way for us to try to confirm whether click bots are being used to artificially boost the rankings of sites for a particular keyword? I can't think of any way to detect that activity.
-
Here are what sites it appears to be coming from.
-
Great tip Tim! You were right on the money. Thank you so much
We did find Russian bots with awful user experience hitting our site starting in April. My webmaster is looking in how to handle this. Any suggestions to get him started?
-
I don't believe they are clicking on my site and providing Google data that I have a bad user experience.
Instead, I think they may be providing an artificially good experience for their site and others that don't directly sell our product. As a result, my user experience is lowered relative to the others.
Once again, it's just a theory based on their prior behavior and what is actually showing in the SERPS, but something I am concerned about. If I'm right, I don't believe I'll be able to detect, nor do anything about it short of having my own click bot, which I won't do.
-
I know this may not be the case, but have you checked your site analytics to see if it is being hit by a number of these Russian bot / crawler style entities that have been doing the rounds of late, if so this could be another of the reasons you are seeing additional bounced number growing.
I found I had a few and over the last few weeks I have made an effort to remove a lot of this negative referral traffic and crawlers.
-
Hi LSlversen
I like your thinking here - to me it sounds like what your users are searching and what they are getting aren't meeting expectations. I would look into that and make sure you are on the right path with what kind content / expectations you are setting.
Here's a bit of reference to what LSlversen is chatting about. Check it out. I would take a step back, ask some hard questions, and prioritize on how you want to attack issues. You'll be better off - I highly doubt there are click bots happening.
Hope this helps a bit more!
-
I guess that's the problem...there are thousands of reasons of why the rankings are what they are and there is no way to determine if a click bot is being used. Is there?
Even if one is being used, I suppose the only thing I could do, is use one myself to counteract it, which I don't like the sound of.
-
Without knowing all the details of the case, maybe it has something to do with searcher intent? Seeing as it's only websites who don't sell the product, maybe that's exactly what the searchers are looking for?
If people who search it are clicking and spending a long time on the top results that are full of info, then it might signal to Google that they found a good result and more of that kind (information pages) will come up higher.
Again, I don't know if this is the case, but it might be a possible explanation for it.
-
Thanks for the reply Patrick
If we had 100% proof, we would have reported to Google and the FBI. Unfortunately, like most DoS attacks, it could not be traced back to anyone.
We rank well for every other industry term. The fact that sites that don't even directly sell the product make me question if something weird is going on here. My dream scenario (as is theirs I'm sure) would be to be on the first page, as the lone website that actually sells my product directly. The other sites don't rank well for any other keyword in our industry...just the biggest volume keyword.
I sent you a private message with our URL and the keyword.
-
Hi there
Can you provide a URL for your company that we can take a look into? Also, do you have proof (whether current or previously as you stated) that this other company has been attacking your site? If so, you should be reporting that to Google. I wouldn't do this though unless you are ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE this company or SEO team is doing this, and you can PROVE it. If you can't, then don't.
If you could though, please provide your URL. As you said you could be being paranoid and it could be a number of things such as your:
On-site SEO
Content
Backlinks Industry & keyword difficulty
etc....that could be hurting your rankings. It'd be easier to gauge with a URL.
Hope this 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
-
"Fake" market research reports killing SEO
Our robotics company is in a fast growing, competitive market. There are an assortment of "market research" companies who are distributing press releases about their research reports (which are of less than dubious quality). These announcements end up being distributed through channels with high domain authority. The announcements mention many companies in the space that the purported report covers - including ours. As a result, our company name and product brand is suffering since the volume of press announcements is swamping our ratings. What would you do? Start writing blog postings on topics and post through inexpensive news feeds? Somehow contact the firms posting the contact and let them know they are in violation of our trademarks by mentioning our name? Other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amelanson1 -
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Effect of same country server hosting on SEO
Hello all, my question is if my website targets a country abc and I have server in the same country abc compared to suppose I shift my server to country xyz can it effect SEO and ranking of my website ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adnan11010 -
What sources do you use to keep on top of SEO news?
I want to try building an RSS feed of SEO news... but not wanting to find myself drowning in materials As such, looking for a short list of recommendations for keeping on top of SEO developments – the impetus is that I'm still discovering changes that happened 2, 3, even 5 years ago, and I want to try and catch these things as they happen. Thinking something actually from Google may be on the list, but some of these sources are pretty on top of things! Seroundtable.com also comes to mind. But what do you use to keep informed? Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ntcma1 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Identifying a Negative SEO Campaign
Hi A friend/clients site has recently dropped 2-3 pages (from an average #2 - #3 position on page 1 over last few months) for a primary target keyword & suspects a Neg SEO campaign hence asked me to look into it. I checked on Removeem and the KW does not generate a red (or even a pink) result. I looked at Ahrefs & MajSEO, backlinks and referring domains have dropped over the period the KW dropped hence presume i can be sure its not a neg campaign since this would show an opposite pattern (as per articles like this: http://moz.com/blog/to-catch-a-spammer-uncovering-negative-seo ) ? Also site has very few site wide backlinks. The keyword is a 3 word phrase with 2 of those words being in the domain and brand name hence presume such kw are relatively safe from neg seo campaigns anyway I would have presumed the backlink/ref-domain drop may well explain the ranking drop but site still in first field of view of page 1 for the other keyphrases which 2 out of the 3 are words are same as effected keyphrase (and also in the domain/brand name) so would have thought these would have dropped too if a neg campaign. Also many of the anchor texts in the disapeared backlinks are for one of the other partial match variant keyphrases which are still top of page 1. Anchor text is at 4.35% for the effected kw according to MajSEO Im pretty confident from the above that i can conclude no negative seo campaign has occurred, nor other type of penalty and probably just a 'wobble' at Google that may well right itself shortly Would appreciate feedback though from others that im concluding correctly just for confirmation ? Many Thanks Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO?
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO? How can you create good quality White Hat links? For example, how do you convince someone to link to your site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0