Nuisance visitors to non active page. What's going on?
-
Hi Guys, for the past several months, I get high volume of searches on a non-existing page /h/9249823.html. These searches come from all over the world from different domains and have a zero session duration. They are automatically forwarded to my home page. The source re Google Analytics is 12-reasons-for-seo.com. The full referrer is 12.reasons-for-seo.com/seo2php. Any idea what is provoking this activity? Any chance it's screwing with my legitimate search results or rankings?
-
Hi there, so just to confirm - you have a page that is redirected to your homepage (I'm assuming not with a JavaScript redirect) and your Google Analytics is reporting that page is getting traffic from 12-reasons-for-seo.com?
This sounds like Measurement Protocol spam, I'll explain why I think that based on the way GA works but to reassure you - if that's the case then all it's messing with is your analytics. Google doesn't use Google Analytics data to inform search rankings - in terms of "bounces" Google just uses data about whether a searcher, on a Google page, clicks one result and then comes back to the search results page and clicks on another.
- Google Analytics records page views based on receiving a message from some JavaScript code that runs on (ideally) every page of your website
- If the page is redirected before it loads (as in not a JavaScript redirect) that code won't have time to run, so Google Analytics won't see you having a page view on that page, even if someone tried to access it
- Measurement Protocol is a way you can manually send hits to Google, it's a way of recording all kind of things that are difficult to reflect in terms of pageviews and events on your site (i.e. someone bought a product over the phone or someone viewed the same page on your app)
- Anyone can get your GA ID by looking at your page code and once they have that, they can send fake pageviews to your Google Analytics.
If it's true that all of these pageviews are landing on a page that doesn't even load before it's redirected (that's important, because if it's a JavaScript redirect your GA code might have time to run) then the best solution for this is probably to find what all of these hits have in common (sounds like you've already found a couple things) then create a Google Analytics filter for your reporting view which excludes this traffic as specifically as possible (to reduce risk of accidentally dropping real traffic)
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
-
Why My Website's Rank still in Millions
I am getting enough Traffic on my website on best weed killer on affiliate but Moz still showing its Rank in millions. What would be the best strategy to improve the rankings.???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sarahelen0 -
How do I optimize pages for content that changes everyday?
Hi Guys I run daily and weekend horoscopes on my site, the daily horoscopes are changing every day for obvious reasons, and the weekend horoscopes change every weekend. However, I'm stuck in how the pages need to be structured. I also don't know how I should go about creating title tags and meta tags for content that changes daily. Each daily and weekend entry creates a new page. As you can see here http://bit.ly/1FV6x0y you can see todays horoscope. Since our weekend horoscopes cover Friday Sat and Sunday, there is no daily for Friday, so it shows duplicate pages across Friday, Sat and sunday. If you click on today, tomorrow and weekend all pages showing are duplicate and this will happen for each star sign from Fri, Sat Sun. My question is, will I be penalized doing this? Even if the content changes? How can I optimize the Title Tags and Meta Tags for pages that are constantly changing? I'm really stuck on this one and would appreciate some feedback into this tricky beast. Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Doorway v Landing Pages - Whats the difference?
I suppose I have not much further information to add apart from ask apart from what is the difference? Both are highly optimized pages but that's where my knowledge ends!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loudawg0 -
Is using Zeus's gateway feature to display contents from the different URL OK to do?
I've been writing a blog on free hosting blog platform and planning to migrate that under my domain name as directory. myblog.ABCD.com to www.mydomain.com/myblog now, I've learned that my Zeus server has a way to show myblog.ABCD.com at mydomain.com/myblog without transferring anything by using the Gateway feature. This will save a lot of time and hassle for me, but my question is if this is ok to do?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HypermediaSystems
Is there a chance that this could be considered a blackhat even though the content is mine? From the Zeus documentation:
"Gateway aliases enable users to request files from the new
web server, and receive them as if they were on the new server, when they are
still located on the legacy server. To the user, the files appear to be located on
the new server. " Thank you.0 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0 -
Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?
Hi all, I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages. These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs. I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs. Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it? Thanks in advance, Luke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How is this different than Go Daddy Spam?
Out of boredom, I googled up "SEO Company". #1 result is qualifiedimpressions.com. Taking a look at their link profile it seems they are utilizing anchor text on all their clients' websites. Moreover, it appears they have multiple sites for each of their phrases (which they cross link). Qualified Impressions - SEO Company WeBuildRankings.com - SEO Service VisibilitySquad - SEO Companies Some of their clients are rocking multiple anchor text links. How is this not any different than what Go Daddy did recently?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ErikDster1 -
Doorway Page? or just a flawed idea?
I have a website which is on a .co.uk TLD and is primarily focused to the UK. Understandably I get very little in the way on US traffic, even though a lot of the content is applicable to the UK or US and could be made more so with a little tinkering. The domain has some age to it and ranks quite well for a variety of keywords and phrases, so it seems sensible to keep the site on this domain. The .com version of the domain is no longer available, and the current owner does not seem inclined to sell it to me. So, I am considering registering a very similar .com domain and simply using it to drive some traffic to the .co.uk site. To do this, I would have the same category pages and the same (or similar) list of links to the various pages in those categories. But instead instead of linking to a page on the new .com, it would take visitors to the existing page on the .co.uk. I would make this transparent to visitors ("Take a look at these pages on our sister site bluewidgets.co.uk") and the .com would have some unique content of its own. Would this be considered some kind of Doorway site/page (content rich doorway), or is it simply bad idea which is unlikely to drive any traffic?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jingo010