Weird referral data. Spam?
-
Hi all,
a few of my sites are suffering from referral spam. I read a couple of articles here on how to exclude them from your traffic using htaccess but today I was going through some referral stats of the company I work for and I noticed a lot of referral traffic coming from
I didn't find any article telling me this is spam, so it could also be an intranet of one of our clients where they are sending their employees to our application.
Anybody a clue what this could be?
-
Thanks Tim,
found out that the domain is registered by a partner of us. They have several webpages where their clients can signup for our service using a single sign on. This is causing the spike in referral traffic, but as it's only a certain call their doing they must not be included in our stats so need to set up some GA filters.
Cheers,
Joris -
Have you done a who.is search on the domain to see if that provides any clues. You may then be able to find out if it is a client etc.
http://who.is/whois/ssosecure.com
I have not heard of it from a spam referral point of view, but that does not mean it is not a new one on the scene. To remove this referral traffic filter your analytics by hostname to remove it if needed.
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 do sites without access to a site's analytical data, determine a site's organic traffic?
I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?
Reporting & Analytics | | Deacyde0 -
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 there an efficient way to block/filter referral spam in Google Analytics for a large network of websites?
Hello, everyone - I'm looking for guidance on how to block or filter referral spam in Google Analytics. But I'm needing to block for an entire network of Wordpress websites. We have two networks which total over 2,500 websites. We are currently blocking sites we find out about via htaccess. This works, but only after we see we are getting hit with the spam. Updating 2,500+ Google Analytics accounts with filtering is not an ideal option due to the time factor and the fact that new bots coming out almost daily. We can continue the htaccess method, but does anyone have any other ideas for blocking referral spam for a large network of sites? These are the other ideas we have. 1. Blocking all traffic from Russia and China based up subnets. We know many will still get through, but it should block 50% of it, we hope.
Reporting & Analytics | | copyjack
2. Moving sites to Google Tag manager. This is a huge tasks but we have seen that sites using Tag Manager are not effected, at least for now. Other ideas are appreciated!0 -
Filter the Spam traffic
Hello everyone, We have to filter traffic from spam website like webcrawler.com semalt.com social-button.com etc. So we created custom filter with Filter field: referral Filter Pattern: Webcrawler.com|semalt.com|in-g61.mail.yahoo.com|d47c5f40.linkbucks.com|buttons-for-website.com|semalt.semalt.com|forum.topic34157145.darodar.com|social-buttons.com While verification of filter there is error displaying i.e. This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small. Please help in resolving issue..
Reporting & Analytics | | Obbserv0 -
Universal Analytics Ecommerce data
Hi there, I have started to use Universal Analytics on my ecommerce site. I have implemented the code using Google Tag Manager. I don't see any ecommerce data on Universal Google Analytics under Conversions/Ecommerce. Can you please point me to the right direction? Also, can you please send me the best article on this topic? I want to know the bit of code that I have to add and all that UA can provide to get the most of my data for my ecommerce store. Thanks and regards
Reporting & Analytics | | footd0 -
Moving data between Google Analytics Properties
Last summer we setup another Google Analytics property for us with Universal Analytics and have been running this alongside the old Google Analtyics property. is there a way of exporting all the old data from the old property into the new Universal Analytics property?
Reporting & Analytics | | ese0 -
Google Maps not passing referral data
Google Maps is not passing referral data (URLs, not KWs). Google+ Local is referring, but nothing from maps. Maps referrals appear to be coming across as direct. Any ideas? We haven't found anything online, one of the guys at the office documented what we did find, using Chrome's debugger - http://manofactionmetrics.com/2012/11/02/google-maps-not-passing-any-referral-data/
Reporting & Analytics | | Danieljacobree0 -
Viewing 'overall' data for multiple Google Analytics accounts
Is there any way you can view data from all of your Google Analytics accounts? For example, if I wanted to view know how much mobile traffic all my sites had, could I do this? Rather than just looking at each site individually. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | intSchools0