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 on a clean website assistance
Hi there, I wondered if someone could help please? I have a site http://www.thecybermagician.com which since I last looked now has a Spam score of 33% I have gone through my links and also read the MOZ articles describing the 27 things which it may be article here: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score but am still struggling to see why my spam score is 33% as it doesn't have any spam links coming into the site. One of the of 5% spam score I have asked for it to be removed. I wondered if you could help me please? Thanks again Duncan
Technical SEO | | derire91 -
Link Spam from Competitor Help
A clients link profile is recently getting lots of spam links related to "abortion pills" and "does my husband cheat" I found a few of the sites that link, and it appears that there is some malicious code on the site injecting links at the top of the site. http://www.med-reporter.at/index.asp?men=Gesundheit&submen=Produkte&artid=1587&kategorie=&blockzl=3 Can anyone look at the link above and tell me what network or software is creating these links?
Technical SEO | | webbroi0 -
Has anyone had their Google manual spam penalty lifted without notice?
In June of this year, our company submitted a reconsideration request, which Google rejected and confirmed that they had a manual spam penalty placed on us. After cleaning up our extensive link portfolio, we submitted our 2nd reconsideration at the end of this month (July) and received this response: Dear site owner or webmaster of domain, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider domain for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Has anyone else or their clients experienced this recently? Can this be attributed to the "softer" Panda update? Any other additional information is greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | eugeneku0 -
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 -
Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade
Hoping someone can help. I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help. We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though). Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News. Sequence of Events: 1. Dec. 13 launch 2. Google news referral traffic stopped 3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News. 4. Retested sitemap When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors. When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP Yet, still no google news referral traffic. Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml Can someone help? We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic. Would love an early Christmas present. Thanks!! Lisa
Technical SEO | | Aggie0 -
Site getting referral traffic from its self
Buon giorno from zero degrees C freezing fog Wetherby UK On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com i ran a referral report via Google Analytics and was surprised ro see referral traffic being counted from its own url, illustration here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/referral-anomoly.jpg So my question is please how can a site get referral traffic from the same url? Grazie Tanto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
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