Sky Lancers: What is the deal?
-
For a few days now we are being stalked by a "referrer" site out of Bangladesh, called sky lancers dot net. Their home page is nothing but a login and password. All traffic comes from one invisible inner page. They don't seem to try to login, nor do they use PPC to get to the site. They send thousands of visitors a day.
Anyone has any idea what this site is trying to achieve and what their goal may be?
All they do is get the bounce rate to skyrocket, the time on the site to go down and the avg page views of course to go down as well, as they click out immediately after they hit the homepage.
Any suggestions on what to do about this practice? And what are they trying to achieve?
Thanks for your insights guys!
-
The visits however are for 85% new visitors, all with unique IP addresses. Don't really think it is a scraper, but it is well possible there is a connection somewhere out there.
Thanks http://gameershoe.com/ -
I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (specialshoes.net) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.
-
... There is a table on the web page (scroll down) which you may discover quite beneficial. It outlines the various pitfalls of various styles of neighborhood-precise URLs, you can see here. I'd count on this form of stuff to maintain actual for the newer provincial TLDs
-
Thanks Joanne!!! Great tip for those who have this problem occur as well.
In a nutshell, only your Analytics is out of wack. Your hosting server (usually) will not show increased traffic. Many newly launched sites are affected by a variety of similar 'referrers'
Personally, I ignored the referrer and it disappeared as sudden as it came, after one month. Exactly as the article suggests.
-
Saw an interesting article related to this sort of thing... they call it Analytics SPAM and have some suggestions for removing it from your reports:
http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/
-
As an update, those visits as we see them in Analytics are not hitting our servers. Not sure how they are doing this, but traffic does show in analytics but we do not see any spike on our servers.
We take the country out through filters at this point so we can at least review some true data.
Your question about how to ignore it after the fact can be done similar:
Go to Google Analytics > Custom Reports > Add Filter > EXCLUDE the country > Save
Now your GA will show all past results without those entries.
It is a custom report, but better than no data at all?
Hope this helps
-
I am seeing it as well. It is really making my analytics a mess, anyone know how to make Google analytics ignore it after the fact?
-
Yep, I found that as well. The "Paid To Click" is an old trick, but they are not coming in through PPC though. Adwords is not showing any sign either, nor is tracking of PPC. that toolbar is an interesting path I have to say.
Thanks for the research Keri!
-
It looks like it's related to a toolbar where people are paid to click on ads. Skylancers.net and skylancers.com appear to be connected, based on the whois info, and on this FB post http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skylancers/200579273364198. Check out the dot com site for some more info.
-
Great idea too, Valery.
The visits however are for 85% new visitors, all with unique IP addresses. Don't really think it is a scraper, but it is well possible there is a connection somewhere out there.
Thank you!
-
awesome answer Ryan, thank you! We blocked the referrers IP but that does not seem to make any difference (yet).
Just puzzled by a site that has no apparent meaning and thousands of people must have a login to that thing. Maybe it is a reroute from somewhere else... no clue.
Will give your advice a go tomorrow and surely will let you know the outcome.
Peter
-
Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.
If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.
-
Hi Peter,
I sympathize with your situation. Since the home page is blank with just a login feature you have no information about the site or its purpose. A Google search for the site shows nothing but the home page. A WHOIS search shows the site owner is private.
There is no way to know the reason behind the traffic. Someone could have shared a "free stuff" post and for whatever reason provided a link to your site. When users arrive at your site they are of course disappointed then leave.
Some options:
-
contact the site owner via the WHOIS e-mail. Ask the site owner to remove the link.
-
block all traffic from Bangladesh. This option will work if all or most of the traffic is from that site.
-
block all traffic which shows that site as a referrer. I have never implemented such a solution but your web host can likely offer options in this regard. You may have to implement a firewall.
Best wishes
-
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
-
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
How do you deal with Scam-Type SEO businesses?
One of our potential clients is a limousine rental service. His current "Marketer" is going about his business in a seemingly sketchy way. I'm pretty new to having to compare myself to other SEO/Marketing competition. So, this guy has 100's of websites that are nearly identical. Quite a few have duplicate content, but all of them generally look the same. He leases these websites as lead generators: Think of it like this: he probably has 15-20 websites all geared for different parts of the DFW area. Denton Limo Service, Plano Limo Service, Dallas Limo Service, Etc. He also has a bunch of websites for other industries. Every "business" has its own phone number via a Google Number that he forwards to the actual business line. Every "business" has a Google My Business Listing setup as well with no address listed. When someone fills out the contact form on one of these sites, it is forwarded to the business who is leasing it. He also creates his own backlinks on his websites to all of his other websites. I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right? I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO. Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this? If so, what do you do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | roger2050 -
How do I deal with Negative SEO (Spammy Links)?
For the past 12 months, our website has been hit by spammy links with annoying anchor text. We suspected one of our competitor are deploying negative SEO on us. The image is an example of the sites and anchor text we have been spammed with. The frequency is about 1 - 2 spammy links a day. I have a few questions from here onwards: Does those links affect our SEO? (Most are mainly nofollow) Other than disavow, what other stuff can I do? How will google and other search engines see this incident? TcmFsti
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Changsst0 -
What's the deal with Yext?
Ok, the "SEO" in me says don't sign my clients up for this. But their ads are EVERYWHERE. All the time. Is this bad/good? thoughts? Have you ever used Yext? I can't find a review online that I don't think is biased. Should I trust my gut on this one and pass?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Spammy Links (from .ru) pointing to my domain! How to deal with it?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce store - I am just looking at the apache logs and I am finding a lot of spammy links that have been referrers to our pages - when I check the links, I cannot find our URL in an HREF on their page so I presume they may be using some country based cloaking? These are the domains that are targeting specific pages on our site:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
http://3xru.ru/
http://saldoconsult.ru/
http://euro-casino.ru/casino/
http://delaymoney.maroderi.ru/
http://intimhot.ru/ How to deal with this? Our site is about cookware and they seem to be pointing these links to very specific products and categories. Never seen anything like this before, help would be appreciated. Thanks, B0 -
Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?
Hi all, I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages. These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs. I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs. Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it? Thanks in advance, Luke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?
Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ayetti0 -
How Google deal with a Domain Buy
Hello folks, How is google dealing with those clever peoples who decide to buy a famous place on internet( domain ), to be their domain name. For example if someone buy a very well ranked domain name for some keywords in their niche, is there any punishment? Whats the bad things about buy a domain? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | augustos0