Weird referral data. Spam?
-
Hi all,
a few of my sites are suffering from referral spam. I read a couple of articles here on how to exclude them from your traffic using htaccess but today I was going through some referral stats of the company I work for and I noticed a lot of referral traffic coming from
I didn't find any article telling me this is spam, so it could also be an intranet of one of our clients where they are sending their employees to our application.
Anybody a clue what this could be?
-
Thanks Tim,
found out that the domain is registered by a partner of us. They have several webpages where their clients can signup for our service using a single sign on. This is causing the spike in referral traffic, but as it's only a certain call their doing they must not be included in our stats so need to set up some GA filters.
Cheers,
Joris -
Have you done a who.is search on the domain to see if that provides any clues. You may then be able to find out if it is a client etc.
http://who.is/whois/ssosecure.com
I have not heard of it from a spam referral point of view, but that does not mean it is not a new one on the scene. To remove this referral traffic filter your analytics by hostname to remove it if needed.
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
-
Is the meta referrer tag still used
Is the meta meta referrer tag still used and is it affective. I have an issue with traffic going from one of my sites to a client site and our referral is going into their direct traffic (in Googel Analytics) instead of being seen as a referral from our site. I saw that people were using the meta referral tag, but I can't find any MOZ info about it other than a blog article from 2015.
Reporting & Analytics | | dpsoftware1 -
Google Analytics - Events impacting session data
Hi Mozzers, Has anybody ever experienced event tracking significantly impacting session data? Here's a summary of what I'm finding: When I measure sessions to a particular hostname (a subdomain) in my Google Analytics report, sessions dropped by over 100% when I removed some event tracking on that subdomain (an event was triggered when a user clicked on a particular button). When I reinstate that event tracking, sessions go back up to around where they used to be. Can anybody understand why this might be happening? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q0 -
Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely. The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following: Browser size visits: 620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5. Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted. If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
Some goal conversion in Google analytics showing under referral
Yesterday I have created Google analytics account for a new website but few goal conversions comes from payment gateway site (paypal.com, epdq.co.uk) and showing under referral. How to fix this issue so I can know the real source of Goal conversion. *Note - utm_nooverride=1 on thank you page applied, payment gateway URL is already placed in Referral Exclusion List. So please don't suggest either of them. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Google referral traffic drop around 14th July 2014 (UK). Anyone else seeing it?
We've seen around a 25% drop in Google referral traffic from the 14th July 2014 onwards and having real trouble identifying why and from what search terms we're being effected. WMT and Moz Pro don't show any movement. Is anyone else seeing the same thing on UK search terms? Seems a bit late to be the effect of Panda 4.0? Any help would be amazing. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | whis1 -
Ecommerce Revenue Data is not Similar to Admin Panel Sales Data
I am webmaster of E commerce website. And, We're selling online home decor products to USA! Today, I was checking my website Admin Panel sales section. I have found big variation in E commerce Revenue data on Google Analytics and Admin Panel Sales Data. I am looking forward forward for quick discussion or suggestion on it. If anybody require further information to know more about issue so please let me know!
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit0 -
Google analytics vs Webmaster tools data
Hi Which is more accurate WT or GA data ? Since GA reporting a KW (thats very recently fallen from page 1 to 3 hence looking into data to find the cause) in the Organic part of Search tab as having generated just 1 visitor over a month (hence presuming fall could be due to low visits from a page 1 result) whilst under Search Engine Optimisation tab (data sourced from WT i think) its reporting 5 click thrus from 150 impressions over same period resulting in a quite good 3.33% CTR (hence wouldn't expect to be the cause of a fall) and what i would have thought GA would report as 5 visits instead of the 1 they do report !? The reason im looking for answer in the data is because no on-page has changed and still scoring a grade A and off page metrics have all improved across the board (apart from small drop in majseo's Trust Flow) such as increased links, RD, Citation Flow, Ref Subnets etc etc etc Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Viewing image search data in Analytics?
How do you view image search data in Google analytics? Do you need to apply tracking or can you drill down into the default data? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bondara0