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 Of Site Increased from 1 to 31% overnight
Hello There,
Technical SEO | | rohit.c
Few days back, Spam Score of two of my sites drastically increased from 1% to 31% for one site and from 1% to 36% for another site overnight. Here are the two websites https://simpalm.com/ ducknowl.com Site background for 2-3 months ABC link exchange campaign was started for both the sites. Links where built on high quality sites with DA40 above and most of them are Saas sites No reciprocal link exchange was done Same new pages are created on the site for on page SEO Both the sites are hosted on GoDaddy Can someone please tell me what is the reason of this Sudden increase in spam score of both the sites and at same time?0 -
Spam score
sir my blog is getting 40% spam score please guide me how can i decrease it please
Technical SEO | | seotoolshero230 -
FB referral combinations
Hi, I am somewhat confounded about the right set of channels to join All facebook referrals into one. In the wake of experiencing various renditions, not certain which one is right and will work A few adaptations state that Search string ought to be - ^.*facebook.com$ furthermore, Replace string ought to be - facebook.com While as per other Search string ought to be > .*facebook also, Replace string ought to be - facebook Kindly guide which one of this is right and will work? Much obliged
Technical SEO | | Aashish20200 -
Spam Links Attack, Negative SEO?
Last April we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to a new domain www.metro-manhattan.com. The old domain has been receiving numerous links from very spammy sites such as these: -adinternet.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.htm <colgroup><col width="263"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
| -www.online-advertisement.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.html | <colgroup><col width="263"></colgroup>
| www.webfind.org/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958/ | Since the old domain redirects to our new domain we are concerned this could be very detrimental. Oddly enough the 50-100 spammy domains that link to us all are a site called: "http://theglobe.se/start/" when the linking domain is entered in the browser. What should we do? Should we disavow these links? Is this some kind of an attack? Would very much appreciate some input/advice. Thank,
Alan1 -
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 -
Manipulative Site Spam - Ideas to Fix?
Hey, We have been asked to fix up a website which has been poorly optimised with manipulative techniques. The company is a local service based business, and the old SEO company created thousands of 'pages' with a list of locations & services. **Examples - ** domain.com.au/suburb1/service1 domain.com.au/suburb1/service2 etc domain.com.au/suburb2/service1 domain.com.au/suburb2/service2 These pages dont actually exists and appear to 301 redirect back to domain.com.au/service1 (this is a real page with real content). The problem is that all of the above mentioned non-existent pages are actually all indexed. Problem: How do I remove a page from the index that doesnt actually exist but has been 301d?
Technical SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
"Spam emails" : ranking drop?
Hello, Is it possible that a website gets penalised by Google because your hosting company blocked you from sending emails? Basically I got a message from my hosting company saying that they were blocking me from sending emails from our server and domain because too many had mistakes or were complained about. The same day we dropped from 2<sup>nd</sup> on a keyword to about 600<sup>th</sup> while still being ranked for other keywords. The drop was for our main keyword. Can the fact we sent “bad emails” be related to a rank drop? For the record, those were confiormation emails for account creation, they were legit, not spam. That's off-topic though.
Technical SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Multiple title and description change is considered spam?
I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months... will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0