Apparent Bot Queries and Impressions in Webmaster Tools
-
I've been noticing some strange stats in Google Webmaster Tools for my forum, which has been getting spam queries with impressions and no clicks.
See the queries in the attached images. This might be a motive for the spammers or scrapers.
I set the date range to just 22 Aug - 22 Nov and I see very obviously the spike is due to impressions.
Questions:
What should/can I do?
Is Google doing something about this?
How to avoid this?
-
Ah, my mistake. I'll ask around on our content team and see if they haven anything.
-
All well and good for Analytics data, but OP is referring to Webmaster Tools spam.
Any blog posts or solutions on Webmaster Tools / Search Console spam in Search Analytics?
-
This is definitely a frustrating issue. We ran a couple blog posts this year that may be able to help:
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
-
This is becoming disgustingly common.
The only thing I can suggest though is to Filter Queries Not Containing "privacy: your email address will not be shared" (or whatever) to get all those search queries removed temporarily from your Search Analytics. But it's a nuisance to have to do it every time...
As for preventing it in the first place, I'm not sure what you can do. The spam isn't targeting your website, it's targeting a search query. I don't know what you could do really to prevent being indexed for a particular search query.... What's your average position for these weird queries anyway?
Really interested to see if anyone can provide an actual solution to this.
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
-
Hiding ad code from bots
Hi. I have a client who is about to deploy ads on their site. To avoid bots clicking on those ads and skewing data, the company would like to prevent any bots from seeing any ads and, of course, that includes Googlebot. This seems like it could be cloaking and I'd rather not have a different version of the sites for bots. However, knowing that this will likely happen, I'm wondering how big of a problem it could be if they do this. This change isn't done to manipulate Googlebot's understanding of the page (ads don't affect rankings, etc.) and it will only be a very minimal impact on the page overall. So, if they go down this road and hide ads from bots, I'm trying to determine how big of a risk this could be. I found some old articles discussing this with some suggesting it was a problem and others saying it might be okay in some cases (links below). But I couldn't find any recent articles about this. Wondering if anybody has seen anything new or has a new perspective to share on this issue? Is it a problem if all bots (including Googlebot) are unable to see ads? https://moz.com/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Matthew_Edgar
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4535445.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBO-1ETf_dY0 -
Malicious bot attack?
Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet. Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank. Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based. Has anyone seen this before?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMHC0 -
Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
Hi Mozzers, I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed. They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking. Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)? Thanks, Cole
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Sudden Recent Drop in Impressions in GWT - WTF?
I noticed this recent drop in impressions in Google Webmaster Tools. It started mid-February, and I know there was the page layout algorithm on the 6th, and I've heard mention of a Panda update around the 11th, so I started to wonder what was resposible. A manual penalty was just recently removed, too. As I dug deeper, I discovered other problems. For one a misredirected blog causing 404s, plus a redirected site whose duplicate pages were never removed from Google's index. There are also two exact match domains 301 redirected to the site, but there were no links or content prior to the redirect. In a site:operator search, one is showing a duplicate homepage. When the wordpress.com blog was redirected, it was not redirected to the /blog subdirectory. Could the resulting 404s which go back as far as I can see in GWT (3 month limit) be the cause of this drop? We're talking about hundreds of blog pages and their links. FYI the main nav in /blog pointed to the old site until 2/7 when I pointed them to the existing domain (so hundreds, if not thousands of links were being redirected) The million dollar question is: is it just the 301 redirect issue causing the problem here? It looks like I might just have exacerbated it when I fixed the nav menu links. Will fixing the redirect rescue the impressions? My plan of attack includes killing the 301 redirects from the exact match domains with no backlinks, and removing the old site from Google's index from within GWT. Any yays or nays? FYI, a 301 redirect of .index.html, default.asp, and non-www was done 1/8,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kimmiedawn
the reconsideration request was sent 1/24, manual penalty lifted 2/10. Index.html still redirects twice, going to www.site.com/index.html before resolving at .com. Same with default.asp. IarDs8u0 -
Search query for SEO Brisbane
Would love to get some opinions on the latest Penguin 2.0 update and how on earth the #1 rank is #1 ranked, very, very peculiar... http://www.google.com/search?gs_rn=14&gs_ri=psy-ab&pq=sila&cp=8&gs_id=10&xhr=t&q=seo+brisbane&pf=p&client=safari&rls=en&sclient=psy-ab&oq=seo+bris&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47008514,d.aGc&biw=1300&bih=569 Any and all theories welcomed and appreciated. Thanks, Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MichaelYork0 -
Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | blagger
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| | | |0 -
Webmaster Tools Showing Bad Links Removed Over 60 Days Ago
Hello, One of my clients received the notorious message from Google about unnatural links late last March. We've removed several hundred (if not thousands) of links, and resubmitted several times for reconsideration, only to continue with responses that state that we still have unnatural links. Looking through the "links to your site" in google webmaster tools, there are several hundred sites / pages listed, from which we removed our link over 60 days ago. If you click each link to view the site / page, they contain nothing, viewable or hidden, regarding our website / address. I was wondering if this (outdated / inaccurate) list is the same as the one their employees use to analyze the current status of bad links, and if so how long it will take to reflect up-to-date information. In other words, even though we've removed the bad links, how long do we need to wait until we can expect a clean resubmission for reconsideration. Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated -
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bromtec0 -
Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0