What is the best way to eliminate ghost traffic from Google Analytics?
-
Hey Mozzers,
I just wanted to see how you all deal with eliminating Google ghost traffic sources from Google. I tried setting up a RegEx 'include' list before, but it seemed as though I was blocking potential traffic sources when I did as much (I'm probably missing something here).
Anyway, I'm interested to read how you all have dealt with this issue in the past, thanks for reading!
-
Hi J.P.,
i have personally found this article and the solution it proposes to be the most helpful - http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/. Hope it helps.
-
I would recommend taking a look at the following if you are struggling with ghost referral type traffic. Its a great post that was touted around last year when referral traffic spiked for a lot of people. - Hopefully this is what you are after.
https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
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
-
Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help. The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'. The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats. Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself? Any help would be greatly appreciated. George 7vprsJo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrinvaleBird0 -
I lost traffic from my website and the rankings also gone down... What should I do?
I've started working on a project recently (for 20 days) and it got average 1800 visitors per day and the ranking were seemed good. When I started that project, I saw that there were too many plugins installed. I removed unnecessary plugins and keep the importance ones. And I started modify some pages considering SEO perspective. Few days ago I created a backlink in reddit; from where I got way too much traffic in the site at the time and the server gone down. So I have to change the server. Now I see the drastic drop down in both ranking and the traffic. I am wondering if the ranking affected when I changed the server? Or Is there any other way to check why my ranking and traffic gone down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
How to stop google bot from crawling spammy injected pages by hacker?
Hello, Please help me. Our one of website is under attack by hacker once again. They have injected spammy URL and google is indexing, but we could not find these pages on our website. These all are 404 Pages. Our website is not secured. No HTTPS Our website is using wordpress CMS Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShahzadAhmed0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
I have plenty of backlinks but the site does not seem to come up on Google`s first page.
My site has been jumping up and down for many months now. but it never stays on Google first page. I have plenty of back-links, shared content on social media. But what could i be doing wrong? any help will be appreciated. Content is legit. I have recently added some internal links is this might be the cause? Please help .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | samafaq0 -
Bounce Rate Manipulated with Direct Traffic Spikes - Thoughts?
Hi Mozzers, we're hoping to get some insight from some of the technical folks out there on what seems to be malicious targeting of a client's website. We recently discovered enormous spikes in direct traffic to the website with 90% originating from the USA and the rest coming from dozens of other countries. Nearly 100% of visits are new sessions and each only lasts a few seconds - thereby driving the bounce rate over 95%! There are other possible identifiers worth noting, including: Browser - 99% use Internet Explorer Browser Version - 89% use IE 7.0 Flash Version - 80% use 14.0 r0 Operating System - 99% use Windows See the attached "Screenshot - Traffic Spikes & Inflated Bounce Rate". Whether this is a negative SEO attack or something else, we're really hoping to get the community's input and (hopefully) possible solutions. Thanks! oYKrMu6
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
Whats up with google scrapping keywords metrics
I've done a bit of reading on google now "scrapping" the keywords metrics from the analytics. I am trying to understand why the hell they would do that? To force people to run multiple adwords campaign to setup different keywords scenario? It just doesn't make sense to me...If i am a blogger or i run an ecommerce site...and i get a lot of visit regarding a particular post through a keyword they clicked on organically. Why would Google wanna hide this from people? It's great Data for us to carry on writing relevant content that appeals to people and therefore serves the need of those same people? There is the idea of doing White Hat SEO and focus on getting strong links and great content etc... How do we know we have great content if we are not seeing what is appealing to people in terms of keywords and how they found us organically... Is google trying to squash SEO as a profession? What do you guys think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theseolab0