Hi Whittie,

The unusual spike on direct visits is most likely because of ghost spam, check your referrals and see if you see free-social-buttons or something similar (there might be others), this spammer has been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. To be sure this is spam go to:

Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension

You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be  "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.

The problem with conventional methods of stopping spam is that they will just take care of the referral part. The best solution for ghost spam is to use a filter that includes only your hostnames. This will stop ghost spam in any form referral, organic, page and even the fake direct visits.

You can read this article for details about this specific issue and the valid hostname filter.

http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

Hope it helps,

Whittie

Hi Michelle,

I can think of 2 main benefits of using words in URLs have instead of numbers.

If you are reading an article about Paella, and there is a list of recipes from different pages:

• mysite.com/453112
• othersite.com/how-to-cook-best-paella/

The second link is most likely to get more clicks. The same situation on Google search page, although the title is more important a readable URL will always be better to the user.

The second benefit for SEO purposes is that matching keywords from the title of you page and the URL will give you a boost, how much will be it is to discuss.

Here is an excellent MOZ article about the topic

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

Hope it helps,

Carlos

Hi Lauren, most likely this is caused by spam, lately spammers have been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. You might want to check if you have something similar to free-share-buttons on your referrals.

These referrals are ghost spam and as I mention before they also hit with fake direct visits,  to identify them go to

Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension

You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be  "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.

Like I said this type of the spam doesn't have a real hostname, so if you create a filter with only your valid hostnames. You will get rid of all ghost spam(current and new) no matter the way it shows, referral, page, keyword, direct.

You can find detailed information about this issue and the solution in this article

http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

Hope it helps,

Acquisition

Hi Jajiv,

Sure there is, you can follow this step by step guide is very well explained.

http://authoritywebsiteincome.com/how-to-actually-set-up-google-analytics-click-tracking-affiliate-links-and-external-clicks-step-by-step-guide/

Hope it helps,

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

http://moz.com/community/q/seeing-massive-spikes-in-direct-traffic-with-100-bounce-rates?#reply_298133

Hope it helps,