Do Ghost Traffic/Spam Referrals factor into rankings, or do they just affect the CTR and Bounce Rate in Analytics?
-
So, by now I'm sure everyone that pays attention to their Analytics/GWT's (or Search Console, now) has seen spam referral traffic and ghost traffic showing up (Ilovevitaly.com, simple-share-buttons.com, semalt.com, etc). Here is my question(s)... Does this factor into rankings in anyway? We all know that click through rate and bounce rate (might) send signals to the algorithm and signal a low quality site, which could affect rankings. I guess what I'm asking is are they getting any of that data from Analytics? Since ghost referral traffic never actually visits my site, how could it affect the CTR our Bounce Rate that the algorithm is seeing? I'm hoping that it only affects my Bounce/CTR in Analytics and I can just filter that stuff out with filters in Analytics and it won't ever affect my rankings. But.... since we don't know where exactly the algorithm is pulling data on CTR and bounce rate, I guess I'm just worried that having a large amount of this spam/ghost traffic that I see in analytics could be causing harm to my rankings.... Sorry, long winded way of saying... Should I pay attention to this traffic? Should I care about it? Will it harm my site or my rankings at all? And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?
-
Hi seequs, to complement Cyrus answer, here is an explanation of Matt Cutts related to your question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU. And if you think about it, it wouldn't be fair since not everyone uses Google Analytics.
About the spam harming your site, if we talk about ghost spam there is nothing to worry(except for your data of course) since there is not real interaction with the spam and any of your pages, it all happens in GA. On the other hand, Crawler Spam does access your site, and it uses your resources, although is nothing to be alarmed since visits from this type of spam are less frequent than ghosts.
If you want to fully block crawlers you can do it by adding some lines to your .htaccess file, like this
STOP REFERRER SPAM
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]It seems that the problem with the spam is not that simple. For what I understand they are preparing a guide. In the meantime, if you are not already using a filter based on valid hostnames, I recommend you to do it, one filter, and you will forget about the ghost spam. You can find more information about this solution here
Hope it helps,
-
Short answer: no (or at least, very unlikely)
Google publicly states they don't pull data form inside GA, and realistically they don't need to. They are only concerned about the performance of their search results, and how that traffic responds to individual results. They also have no reason to lie about not using GA data, as there are so many other sources of information that are better.
"And finally... when is google going to shut these open back doors in Analytics so that Vitaly and his ilk are shut down forever?"
Great question! Hopefully soon.
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
Main keyword decline in SERPs ranking :-(
Hi Moz, My very humble attempts at SEO has been doing very well for over a year with the keyword phrase 'vintage chanel bags'. Recently, about 3-4 months ago I noticed it dropped from rank 1 to rank 5. I've slowly but steadily been building up more social marketing interaction (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram mostly), brand awareness in company is increasing more searches for 'Vintage Heirloom', great in-links from reputable companies & bloggers. What I'm confused about is that one of our competitors Rewindvintage now appears as no.1 for this keyword but tracking with Moz every metric we outperform them on, namely domain authority & Page Authority. I have noticed they have 4 anchor text links (dubious quality wordpress comments), with the anchor term vintage chanel bags and we have none despite ranking no. 1 for so long?? I'm trying to use the Moz science here, just a bit confused. Any help, insights, similar experience would be much appreciated. I engage only in white hat and look for slow & honest SEO growth (as far as I'm aware ! ). Thanks for looking Kevin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Removing Poison Links w/o Disavow
Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today. There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html" This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself. So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen. How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least. One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here? Here we go!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jesse-landry0 -
Copied Content/ Copied Website/
Hello guys, I was checking my product descriptions and I found out that there is a website that is using my descriptions word by word, also they use company name, product images, they have a link that sends you to my site, contact form.. I tried to purchase something and the order came through our email, but i made an inquire and it didn't come through. Also they have a sub-folder with my company name. Also they have url's with my company name, and this isn't right is it? I am confused and honestly I don't know what to do, we don't take part to any affiliation program or anything like that and we don't ship out of Europe. This is a Chinese website. Just for curiosity, I noticed that one of our competitors is there as well, and it does seem weird. Here is the links: www.everychina . com/company/repsole_limited-hz1405d06.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Page 1 Ranking - Disappeared!
Hi All We launched our client's website http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk in January this year. We have been building links making sure we are not over optmising anchor text and only following ethical SEO tactics. Our client's site eventually hit page 1 for it's main key word 'Roller Banner' 1 week ago, the site received impressions/clicks from the SERPS and has started to gain traffic from that particular keyword. I have checked today, and I cannot our client's website URL within the first 10 pages of Google, nevermind on page 1. Our client is currently undercutting competitiors on price, which we stated (the price) in the meta tag. Is it possible other SEOs could de-rank our website? If not, what would be a likely explaination for this occurance? Would just like to add, I recently build a link with anchor text 'Roller Banner Website, but one of my older links uses anchor text 'Roller Banners Cheap Website' - They're not exact match, but could this affect our ranking? Awaiting help Lewis
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Links via scraped / cloned content
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0