Why am i seeing google.inc in analytics as direct traffic? Bug?
-
Recently i have seen two clients sites see a spike in direct traffic coming from google.inc. Is this a bot/bug which i should filter out. Just a bit confused why google.inc has visited our clients site 676 times!
Any insight would be great.
-
I have recently (in the last week) followed Carlos' OHow article on removing fake crawler and ghost referral traffic to help produce clean data. It is a great blog post and helped a lot.
Second to this, I was over on SEO Round Table earlier, apparently according to a Google hangout from John Mueller the Google Analytics team are aware of referral spam as an issue. Hopefully in the long run they will get on top of this issue.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-referrer-spam-20394.html
In the mean time Carlos' article below will help you set up filters and htaccess blocking of crawlers etc.
-
You can see in this image the network used by free-buttons and the amount of fake direct visits it leaves http://i.imgur.com/Kx4PD15.png . They started in middle May when the problem with fake direct visits began.
Campaign Source is the right way to exclude the referral. However, it won't stop the fake direct visits that free-buttons (and maybe others) leave. Ghost spam has changed, I have seen it in different forms referral (the most common), organic, events and the most confusing direct visits.
Another disadvantage of the Campaign Source solution is that everytime a new spam shows up you have to add to a filter, and by the time you add it you already have hits.
That's why I recommend the other solution with valid hostnames since ONE filter will prevent all ghost spam in any form.
Hope it helps,
-
Custom filter - Filter field- Campaign Source with a Regex filter pattern
-
What method are you using to filter free-social-buttons and the rest of the spam?
-
Hi Carlos,
Thanks for your response.I have already filtered out all the dodgy spam such as free-social-buttons. So it is not that. I have also checked my last few days and I have not had another visit from google inc. It seems like it just appeared for a month and has disappeared.
Just need to know if it is spam or not. Has anyone else seen direct visits come from google inc.?
-
If the hostname is "not set" or a fake one then is ghost spam most likely, if you check your referrals you will probably see free-social-buttons(might be others) this one I noticed that hits with fake direct visits along with the referral spam.
Conventional methods of stopping the spam like excluding the referral won't have any effect in the direct visit. To take care of all ghost spam, you should use a filter based on your hostname.
You can find more information on this related question
Hope it helps,
-
I have checked under Technology - Network and this is where it shows google.inc. Viewing under All Traffic-Channels and adding second dimension it does show not set. I have checked the source and medium and it says (direct)/(none).
-
Have you also checked the medium and campaign parameters for this source? It could be that somebody is just messing with you and as you can use UTM to mess up every traffic source.
-
Hi Blue, in which dimension you are seeing google.inc? If you choose hostname as a second dimension do you see "not set"?
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
-
Dip in traffic from Pune for our sites in Google Analytics
Hi, We have noticed dip in traffic from Pune after 6th May'14 in our Google Analytics account for few of our sites. Did anyone noticed the same for your site. Kindly let me know if you have any idea. Thank and Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | vivekrathore0 -
Google Analytics subdomain ecommerce tracking flatlines :-(
Buongiorno from 19 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 This website http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ contains a shop sub domian @ http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/. I configured the site Ga analytics code to include the subdomain (see below code). I had to do this as i was getting refferal data from the actuall subdomain. But after following the instructions on p117 of cutroni's ga book things have gone wrong, mainly now eCommerce data has dissapeared 😞 So my question is please: "Why has installing the GA code above caused eCommerce tracking to suddenly go dead?" Grazie tanto,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
David0 -
Setting up goals - google analytics
Hi Im new user google analytics I would like to set up goal for website. I asked to basic questions: What are my bussiness objectives? Answer:make the visitor to click on a advertisment (affiliate links and affiliate banners) to be redirected to company website to finish purchase. How to set up goals? How can I track ads (affiliate banners and affiliate links) on my website?
Reporting & Analytics | | info_tipovanie-stavkovanie.com0 -
Google Analytics: Deleted Profile
Has anyone ever successfully managed to have a deleted GA profile restored? One of our client's profiles was deleted accidentally. I know the official line is it can't be restored, but...
Reporting & Analytics | | David_ODonnell0 -
Keep multiple Google Analytic / Webmaster accounts seperate?
Hi, I have a paranoid suspicion that putting all my websites on one Webmaster / Analytic account will mean any links between my sites won't carry any weight, and Google might consider similar content much more readily if 2 of my sites are in the same market. So I have about 4 different accounts with my main sites split across them. Am I being over paranoid? Do any of you have any problem with all your sites being on the same account?
Reporting & Analytics | | SpecialCase0 -
Track image searches on google analytics
How can i track image searches on google analytics? To filter the refferers by image.google or /imgres does not work in new google analytics (and brings an impossibly small number on old GA). also, this would not cover local google image refferers, that don't come from image.google.com. anyone knows how to find image search sources? i haven't found anything helpful in google's documentation or forums. thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | zeepartner0 -
Google Analytics Admin account not allowing us to add other users?
Our Google Analytics Administrator account is not giving us access to the User Manager, and because of that we are unable to add users; have you ever ran in to a problem such as this, if so what was your solution. Thanks a Billion impressions, Vijay E2qE9.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | vijayvasu0 -
Do Google Analytics filters affect link building?
We recently made a few link wheels for specific product pages. We've been having great results with all of the wheels except for one. The one we are having issues with is the only link that we were using a Google Analytics filter on; it looks like this http://domain.com/page.htm?zSource=Specific Keyword%tracking My question is does Google ignore links that are obviously utilizing their analyitcs custom filters? We're doing some more testing to try to find out if it truly is the link or if the wheel is a bad one. There are so many things that could go wrong but with so many of our link wheels working well, I wonder if the filters are what is causing such results.
Reporting & Analytics | | MichealGooden0