Mysterious Referral Link
-
This keeps coming up in some of our top Referrals on our website in Analytics. Does anyone know what it is? We have tried researching it and have had not luck. http://vizedhtmlcontent.next.ecollege.com/
-
I received a forbidden error instead. I would not be surprised if this was spam or either a sub site on college boards.
I've seen in the past where universities that allow students to create subdomains and I've even seen people cloak Google on these subdomains!
Depending on the referral traffic behavior and what your own site's content is, we can't really tell you why you might be getting referral traffic from them.
-
Hi Reggie
It looks like that there might have been a page there at some point that was referring to your site but now that page has gone. You should see the link disappear from your crawl results at some point.
Peter
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
-
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Domain Authority and Links drastically decreased in less than a month
I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time. Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them. There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything. I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!
Reporting & Analytics | | everestagency0 -
How long before links are found in analytics?
I'm new to website building and have recently set up some links by submitting my website in directories and have also got some people in the same industry to link to my website. But they aren't being found in moz analytics. Does it take time or should they be getting found?
Reporting & Analytics | | PaddyCoop0 -
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 -
Cross Domain Tracking in GA (without cross domain links)
Hi everyone, Been doing some research about cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics (preferably Universal Analytics where documentation is a bit spare). All of the tutorials focus on the auto-linking and ensuring links to the other site are taken care of. I'm considering a site that may not cross-link like that at all (or it may, but won't be the main avenue). A good example is: www.gap.com
Reporting & Analytics | | ketanmv
www.bananarepublic.com
www.oldnavy.com Now, they do link to the other brands in their navigation but let's pretend that they don't necessarily do that. Gap Corporate may want to roll up all these domains into a single reporting profile because customers can clearly visit any of those sites on their own and buy. It would be nice to know that Visitor X bought 2 items from gap.com and 3 from oldnavy.com... and of course, here were their campaigns, etc. From what I am reading, I am not sure this is really possible. It seems that the cross-domain code is really only best for when my main site links to another domain for checkout or something. But in my example, we are definitely not in control of that kind of behavior. Thoughts? Perhaps I need to recommend they go with subdomains only which Universal GA seems to handle quite fine out of the box. Thank you!0 -
Subdomain referral
Hi, We have two sites mysite.com and aa.mysite.com. We want to track these sites separately. We created two different properties with IDs UA-XXX-1 for main domain UA-XXX-2 for subdomain. gaq code for main domain is as following, gaq code for subdomain is as following, It works well for subdomain. But we want to see traffic from subdomain to main domain as referral.
Reporting & Analytics | | OkanKortan
What is wrong with the gaq code of main domain?
Do i need to change code or is it enough to inactivate subdomain tracking option in profile settings of main domain? Thanks in advance,0 -
Excluding referral traffic from a specific page Google analytics
Hi, I am trying to exclude from referrals from a particular page i.e. www.domain.com/nothispage within Google analytics, I have tried a couple variations within the advanced filter (Regex etc) section without much luck, could anyone assist ? Updated-trying to do this using a filter for the entire profile. Thanks Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
Finding and removing "Bad" Back Links
In the process of trying to figure out where all of the “Bad” backlinks are coming from I used the SEOmoz Site Explorer. I can see the links that may be questionable but am not sure how to determine if these are the issue causing the loss of rank or could it be something else. On Google webmasters they list Siteloki.com as the one with the most links. The count is now at 13,005. (see attached WMT report)
Reporting & Analytics | | rdominey
I first noticed this a month ago, 6,742 links and have tried contacting them with no reply, no results, I have even posted on the site asking to be removed from their listing and not response. Website: www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com I do not understand why this site is not showing up in the Site Explorer link analysis report (See attached)? Could this be some sort of hack or hidden links that Site Explorer does not see? How do I determine if this is real or not, if it is the reason that Google is demoting us? Google says that we are not being manually penalized? 5zAQq Iz9ct0