Pornhub-forum spam
-
I'm receiving a number of spam referrals in GA.
This is also coming up in content drill down. For example mysite.com/www.pornhub-forum.ga
I'm under the impression this is ghost spam and does not affect my site in anyway - just my data.
I believe the fix is to filter it out in GA.
Can someone confirm this is correct?
Thanks
-
As Bob said, these porn spam referrals are just the latest in what looks like it will be an unending fight to keep your analytics data clean. We keep our list fairly up-to-date with the latest spam referrers if you want to try to filter them before they show up in your account.
http://www.theedesign.com/blog/2015/blocking-spam-referral-traffic-google-analytics
-
We saw a lot of this porn spam referrals lasts weeks as well with a brand new website. I would just filter it out and don't worry about it.
-
Difficult to confirm without having the actual site. Looks like analytics spam on first sight.
You can find some useful info on how to block this in this article: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
rgds,
Dirk
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 stop Spam Referral Traffic?
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc. What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help? Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO2 -
Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely. The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following: Browser size visits: 620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5. Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted. If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
Stripping Out Referral Spam
I'm working my way through Google Analytics adding filters to all Spam referrals. 1. Am I doing this correctly:- Filter > Custom > Exclude - Campaign Source > Filter Pattern - Website address 2. I understand I can also strip out referral spam from past data Can anyone tell me how to do this or direct me to a blog or article about this? 3. Who on earth are Semalt, and why do they keep changing their URL and bombarding our websites? Appreciate any help. Christina
Reporting & Analytics | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Stripping Out Referral Spam From Past Reports
Hi, I'm looking to confirm the best approach for retroactively stripping away referral spam (free buttons, SEMalt, etc.). Now to be clear, I already have filters in place to ignore them from current stats, so moving forward I'm fine. However, I'd love to go back and check untainted stats. I've setup segments using a regex to strip the root words away and it seems to be working. I have a regex setup to strip out things like: social-buttons|seoanalyses|copyrightclaims|classifiedads|jobsense|free-share-buttons|e-buyeasy|acrobats.hol|cheap-online|amezon|search-help|qut-smoking and so forth. I've been going through my referral data, noticing obvious spam, and adding their domains to my segment. Is this the optimal way for me to get a clear, untainted view of my past stats?
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Is Google doing anything about the spam referrer plague in Google Analytics?
My client manages 15+ websites and we have observed the spam referrer issue has gotten steadily worse and worse in the last few months. I took the time to weed out the worst offenders via traffic filters but our referral traffic source garden was quickly full of weeds again a few weeks later. Does anybody know what the Google Analytics development team is doing to combat the spam referrer issue? I find it quite amazing that Google goes through the asinine effort to block out organic keyword data ("not found" & "not provided) but they don't seem to care about blacklisting/filtering spam referrers. RHnE6Wx
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB3 -
Why doesn't Google seem to care about referral spam?
In researching the issue of referral spam, there is no shortage if info, both on MOZ and beyond. But, neither the Google Analytics Blog or Help Forums seem to mention the issue at all. I'd think it is something that they would want to get rid of, yet it seems like they don't even acknowledge that it exists. Anyone have insights into this? Am I missing something, or is Google strangely silent on an issue that is becoming more and more annoying for anyone trying to use GA data?
Reporting & Analytics | | irapasternack1 -
Spam link? Links from linguee.*
Hello, in a site, in which I'm working .. in webmaster tools i see a lot of links as following: With more links to your site: linguee.es 3.066
Reporting & Analytics | | jarizaro
linguee.com 2.964
linguee.pe 2.722
linguee.mx 2.721 Total inlinks to my site are 20.000, and links incoming from linguee.* are more than 50% !!! My site is about spanish courses in spain, but i think all these links are fuck*ng me. I checked if these links have nofollow tag, and not, they don't have this attritute. What can i do? My site is going down in Google. ¿disavow that domain? Please help.0 -
Top Notch SEOs on the forum - I have a challenge for you!
I have been hitting my head again the wall trying to figure out why Google does not move my page up. All the SEOMOZ numbers show that the page has higher authority than the competition, more links, more domain authority, older domain, and higher Page rank. In addition the page is error free and I've gotten a W3C HTML 4.01 approval. About a month ago We were at #10 , then after the changes I've made to content and the page Google moved the page to #8, Now the Page is back to #9. I've done plenty of SEO to drive traffic to the page and created some very powerful and quality links. However, it seems like the page is being punished for something. Much weaker competitors are outranking our page and I am not sure why. On page optimization, title tags, Meta Tags, keyword density, etc - everything is there. In fact I have a check list that I go by and everything is by the book. Not only that, one competitor now shows up twice. First the domain and then specific page. I've looked into specific page and all they did is create 600 internal links from their own website. So now they are number #2 and #3 If anyone can take a look and give me an idea of what is going on and maybe suggest Keyword: Laser Marking Url: http://tinyurl.com/3nt3g2h Any help would be appreciated..
Reporting & Analytics | | DmitryP0