Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
-
Hey Moz,
I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced.
I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction.
I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website.
Nicer than most design/content.
They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here.
The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April.
Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough.
Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds.
There is no way that the traffic is real.
It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me.
How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
-
Hi James! Did Luke's resource help? Do you still need some help?
-
Thanks for the link. I will check it!
- James
-
Hi James,
I recently came across this blog that has several different solutions to solving spam on Google over on Optimize Smart. It covers so many different kinds of spam it may be of some help. It's mainly Referral but does touch on Organic.
Hope you find what you need,
Luke
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 i can increase my page authority?
Hi, I have website and i want to increase my page authority. My website is latestdatabase.com I have making more backlinks but not good page authority so far. Please give me suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LatestMailingDatabase1 -
Can Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Limit on Google Removal Tool?
I'm dealing with thousands of duplicate URL's caused by the CMS... So I am using some automation to get through them - What is the daily limit? weekly? monthly? Any ideas?? thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120