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
-
Delays in Search Console Data
We are seeing big delays in search console data this month. In the past we have seen delays of a few days, but I have never noticed it being this long before. At the moment we have no data since 23rd February. Have I just never noticed this before or is this particularly long? Is anyone else seeing the same thing?
Reporting & Analytics | | Wagada0 -
Something does not add up with WMTs search analytics data
we recently replatformed our main site and switched to https. For the first 2-3 weeks after we moved organic traffic was great, we did not lose any ( increased a little), but then it dropped off significantly. Attached is a screenshot from one of our main keywords that dropped off. You can see click (blue) and impressions (red) dropped off, and the position became unstable, but in the last week it has stabilised to about the same position it was before, but the clicking and impressions are still very low. The keyword is generic (for our industry) and there would not be any major seasonal changes in the search volume. I can't make sense of this data, could be be wrong? Kd3p5f9.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | PaddyDisplays1 -
When will traffic data be working ? also whats with the spike in duplicate listing issues with everyone.
Hi There, We have no traffic data, is this something we are doing wrong or is this an issue with SEOMOZ ? Also duplicate listings have gone sky high, check goggle analytics's and all ok ? Any answers ? Thanks Charlie
Reporting & Analytics | | pro580 -
Google referral drop after setting preferred domain
Hey all, After doing a lot of research, and verifying here in the forum, I set our site's preferred domain on monday. We had no preferred domain set for years, but we were already redirecting the non www site to the www one. So, it was evidently an oversight. The day after I set the preferred domain (Jan 29) our google referral traffic hit an all time low. Any other thoughts on the cause? Any ideas on why setting a preferred domain would be a bad idea? Our site is www.mnn.com. Thanks!! Lisa
Reporting & Analytics | | Aggie0 -
Excluding referral traffic from a specific page Google analytics
Hi, I am trying to exclude from referrals from a particular page i.e. www.domain.com/nothispage within Google analytics, I have tried a couple variations within the advanced filter (Regex etc) section without much luck, could anyone assist ? Updated-trying to do this using a filter for the entire profile. Thanks Marc
Reporting & Analytics | | NRMA0 -
Google Maps not passing referral data
Google Maps is not passing referral data (URLs, not KWs). Google+ Local is referring, but nothing from maps. Maps referrals appear to be coming across as direct. Any ideas? We haven't found anything online, one of the guys at the office documented what we did find, using Chrome's debugger - http://manofactionmetrics.com/2012/11/02/google-maps-not-passing-any-referral-data/
Reporting & Analytics | | Danieljacobree0 -
Keyword referrals in GA
Hi chaps, Quick question for you. I'm drilling down in GA to one of our eCommerce pages which has a pretty high bounce rate. I'm looking at referring keywords and they don't seem to make much sense. The page I'm looking at is a pretty deep page but the top referring keywords are all branded terms. The page isn't included in our site links. To explain a little further, this is the scenario I think is happening: User searches using "Brand term". They then click through to our homepage and eventually land on the deep shopping page (on a different subdomain) In GA Content > Site Content > Pages > Primary dimension set to keyword - "Brand term" shows as the referring keyword. Does this sound right? We have a custom GA script set up to track multiple subdomains.
Reporting & Analytics | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
If a site has 301 redirect - Will the Analytics of the target site show it as a referral or as the traffic source it came from?
Lets say I have a site www.abc.com and I rederect that site to www.xyz.com. If ABC.com is still ranking for keyword X and orgnically someone searches for X and they click on the ABC.com listing - In the XYZ site analytics (which is the target site) does it show as organic or referall, direct? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | M_80