Referral source not indexed or showing up in GSC
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I've been doing a lot of research about this and have not been able to find an answer just yet.
Google analytics is showing over 43k referrals from about 35 different spam sources. I checked the hostname thinking that they were ghost referrals and I was surprised to see that they all show our domain so that part is disqualified. The next thing I did was to look at the referral path to look at the pages that were pointing to the site and when I clicked to launch the link the window loaded YouTube or did not load at all.
After doing a bit of research I came across **Disavowing Links, **at first it sounded like the perfect solution for this, but after reading all the warnings that everyone gives I decided to spend more time researching and to use that as a last resource.
I proceeded to check Google Search Console to identify those backlinks and to make sure they were coming up there as well.
To my surprise, none of these links show up in GSC. Neither for the www or the non-www property.
I have decided to avoid disavowing the links before making sure that this is the correct thing to do. Although it may still seem like it is, I want to ask for an expert opinion or if anyone else has experienced this. If GSC doesn't see them it means that Google is not indexing them, my problem is that GA still sees them and that concerns me. I don't want this to affect our site by getting penalized, or by losing ranking.
Please help!
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Thank you Thomas, that was my biggest concern. I'll definitely take a look at the guide.
Cheers!
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It sounds like you're getting referral spam in Google analytics.
They aren't actually linking to you, so the good news is that it won't impact you within Google search, the worst thing they can do is skew your data. Their aim is to try and get you to their sites.
This is a guide that's great for blocking all referral spam: http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/
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