Referral Traffic Issue
-
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of.
Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
-
That's the thing. These sites are just random, out of context sites, with no ads. I've crawled them and they are just middle of the road blog type sites (no comments), with few outbound links. Really weird.
Where I can i've blocked in htaccess and hope if it is 'a problem' they get fed up before I do!
-
I get some of this type of traffic.
It is coming from spammer sites. These sites often look like a "directory" or they look like "search results". They are usually running in industries where the cost of an adwords click is moderate to expensive. They are always running ads - usually Adsense.
I think that they operate in a few different ways...
a) Dynamic site: you go there today and can't find a link. That is because they are changing the data continuously - perhaps daily or by visitor. The might think that changing the data on the site continuously will help it survive in the SERPs. Look at this site today, then go back in a day or two, you will likely see that it is completely different, sometimes it will "look" identical, but the destination of the links have changed.
b) Referral log spammers: there never was a link to you on their site. They have a computer program sending a "visitor" to your site so that they appear in your referral log. They are doing this in industries where people pay a lot of money for clicks and pay really close attention to their visitors. They know that you will come looking. They hope that you will click on their ads.
c) Malware trap: another referral log scheme to get staff from a high value business, maybe a competitor, to visit their site. That referral in your log was "bait" and you are stepping into a malware trap. A small business in a high value niche is the most lucrative and vulnerable malware target. Staff who are chasing reefers have access to adwords accounts, adsense accounts, checking accounts, credit card with high limits, they got your name, address and zip code.
d) Adsense/Adword: these sites display Adsense. Yesterday a visitor, genuine or robotic, was on their site and "clicked" your ad. That produced a visitor to your site and income for their site.
e) Combinations of the above: Two or three of the methods above are all being used.
Be careful.
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
-
Does intercom support pages and redirect issue can affect the SEO performance of our website?
I noticed that in the redirect issues I have, most of the issues are coming from our Intercom support links. I want to ask, does intercom support pages and redirect issue can affect the SEO performance of our website?
Reporting & Analytics | | Envoke-Marketing0 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
How do I track specific referral traffics journey through a website?
Hello, A client has asked us to track the journey each separate referral traffic visitor takes through out the website. I have had a look through analytics and am not sure how to ensure I can do this for all referral traffic visitors? Can anyone help? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
Referral exclusion not working correctly?
Hi!I've added our gateway payment system to the Referral Exclusion List a few months ago. Nevertheless, it continues to appear as a referral, and obviously taking almost all of the revenue. Does it work for you? Do you know why could it be not working for my website?Thanks for your response!
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
Referral Traffic vs. Campaign Traffic in Google Analytics
I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Reporting & Analytics | | aaronprimal0 -
Traffic Drop with no real explaination?
Hello Everyone, On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BestOdds0 -
Google Analytic Tracking Issue (&utm_nooverride=1)
Hello, We have a problem that means we are unable to track our AdWords and organic work at all. Looking at "/All Traffic Sources" and clicking on "Ecommerce Tab" in Analytics we can see that (made up ratio :)):
Reporting & Analytics | | jannkuzel
£2 is attributed to Google/ CPC
£1 is attributed to Google / Organic
But £100 to Payment Provider/ referral and also various referrals from banking transaction pages. All of the revenue/conversions are being credited to the payment provider or the bank security checks the payment goes through. After having done some research we have found that the problem may be that Google Analytics attributes the purchase to the most recent click (on the payment provider button) rather than the initial click on the cpc campaign/organic or direct etc. Some people have suggested using the "&utm_nooverride=1"
tag which we wanted to run past you guys and confirm whether adding
this tag to the payment provider 'buy now' button on our website will
presumably fix this referral problem? Alternatively does the tag need
to be entered into our CPC campaigns as well? Or can you please guide
us in another way? We have also heard that "cross-domain" tracking could be the solution. So we are really confused what to do and where hoping someone had maybe been through something similar and could advice before we fully launch into a solution. In addition, it should be noted that our 'Goals Funnel Visualisation'
of 'checkout' breaks up at the penultimate stage of the checkout. All
customers exit through the /checkout_process (penultimate) but are recognised returning to the successful checkout page but there is a missing link in between these
two stages as 0% pass through is shown even though they do return? Thank you so much in advance for all your help.0 -
Can you get local search numbers/traffic out of Google Analytics?
With Google's new local search I am more curious as to market penetration on keywords that are now localized to my different US cities. I understand that you can separate out Google traffic based on regional Google domains, but I am curious if there is an effective way to separate out searches and keywords based on a my local US Metros? If google cannot do this, any recommendations on products that can? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Thos0031