Block unwanted traffic
-
Hello everyone,
I have started developing a website about 45 days ago. I have noticed that I'm receiving traffic from adult websites. I've been tracking the traffic via GA. I have not started my link build process yet, but I'm still receiving about 15 to 30 visits per day from these websites.
I've had this domain name without use for about 5 years. The domain name was originally registered in 1998. I don't have a background on the previous owners so I wouldn't know their SEO practice.
What's the best practice to block this traffic? Google has yet to index the domain by the brand keyword. I feel the referring traffic could be affecting my SERPs.
Bing has already index the site and started referring traffic by the brand keyword. Yes, the brand keyword is on the domain name (brandkeyword.com).
Thanks in advanced.
-
I completely agree with Patrick. I can't reiterate enough, before you start blocking traffic make sure you do your research. For example semalt, a well known "spider" seems to send fake visits. Before you actually block anything, it might be worth just filtering analytics to get a true analytics of traffic.
I try and view blocking/disavow as a last ditch effort. They will have the most drastic impact.
Patrick included some great links, I highly suggest checking them out.
-
Hi there
I would check Google's Report spam, paid links, malware, and other problems and see if you this is a route you should take. I would also do a backlink audit and check which links you should reach out to for removal. You can also add suspicious links to your disavow file.
Here's a great guide to remove this from your Analytics traffic and, although I have never tried this, here's some tips to block traffic from these spam sites. I would use caution on that though and consult your web dev team.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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
-
Large traffic loss, how to resolve?
So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed. We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+ - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make? What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here. Await your replys thanks. 3BCQNi3
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
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 -
Besides technical error improvement, best way to increase organic traffic to movie review website
I have a friend's website, ShowBizJunkies, that they work very had at improving and providing great content. I put the website in a more modern theme, increased speed (wpengine, but maxed out with cdn, caching, image optimization, etc) But now I'm struggling how to suggest further improving the seo structure or building backlinks. I know trying to come up for those terms like "movie reviews" and many similar are ridiculously difficult, and requires tons of high quality backlinks. What is my lowest hanging fruit here, any suggestions? My current plan is: 1. Fix technical errors 2. Create more evergreen content 3. Work on timing of article release for better Google News coverage 4. More social sharing, sharing on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook Groups, G+ Communities, etc 5. Build backlinks via outreach to tv show specific sites, movie fan sites, actor fan sites (interviews)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinMurray1 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month
Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Direct Traffic has Dropped 48% to Last Year
Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices. Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else? Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice? Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note: Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped. In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds. We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited. In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images. We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic. Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue. Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimmyFritz1 -
Loss of 85-90% of organic traffic within the last 2 weeks.
Hey Everybody, Have a client that recently came to us asking for SEO help. Did some initial analysis on their current SEO status and most everything looked pretty good. On-page work was pretty good, nothing really lacking there other then missing alt tags for all images. Their linking profile looked good too. Lots of good links from quality sources, all relevant. Client has done some good press releases. They could probably use a bit more focus in their content as it is somewhat general and not keyword focused. Initially it didn't look like they needed any help with their SEO, so was a bit curious as to why they contacted us. Today we get their google analytics information and immediately noticed that they have had a 85-90 percent drop in organic traffic from all major search engines that started about two weeks ago. If all their SEO looks to be done properly, any ideas what would account for the massive drop in traffic? The only thing that looks like may have happened is that they may have dropped a couple spots from position #1 to position 2-3 for some of their highest traffic terms. Even if that is the case, I would not expect such a high drop off in terms of organic traffic. Just curious as to what anyone else can attribute the huge drop in traffic to or what else may help identify the issue. It's almost as if analytics was turned off or removed from the site, but that is not the case.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Sudden Large Traffic and SERP Drop
Hi This site www.militaryplaques.com We have had steady traffic over a number of years with the site both on terms of impressions, click through rates, bounce rates, time on site and most importantly sales. The site has remained fairly static over the last 6 months with no significant changes to content or structuire. However, on July 11 our traffic and impressions crashed by over 90% and remain at this low level. We have never been hit by Panda but this looks like such a case?! Any insight or suggestions as to why the sudden "de-listing" may have happened? R/ John J Morgan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheNorthernOffice790