Can you add a secondary dimension of medium and upload another screenshot? You will be able to cut out a large number of spam visits when you so that.

Essentially you will end up with hostname (not set) having medium of referral and medium of none.

Upload a screenshot and I may be in a better place to advise

I am in the same boat as you Lauren. What I am struggling to come to terms with is that when looking at the user flow report, there is a lot of movement on the site internally to and from this page indicating that this is not a spam bot.

I tried isolating many factors but arrived at a loss. There was one thing I checked which helped me see that the data may indeed be skewed.

View these two reports and tell me if they are showing the same data:

1. Behaviour > Site Content > All pages (primary dimension of page)
2. Behaviour > Site Content > All pages (primary dimension of page title)

Those two reports give me very different results. page report shows the massive spike while page title is more realistic.

I am also looking for a possible explanation to this.

Posted up on Google forums too, waiting to see if anyone can help - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/stvN44gwYU4;context-place=forum/analytics

Sorry, hotlinking was the wrong word to use, we're actually just embedding the images.

Is it possible that Google recognises that spammy sites (as an example) tend to embed lots of images and therefore use it as an indicator of spam?

Also, is poor netiquette ever taken into account? Again, maybe because Google is trying to find spammy sites?

For the record, it is something we'll be fixing (especially from a copyright point of view), but we're trying to prioritise this. If there's a potential SEO impact, we'll sort it quick, if not, then we'll do more pressing things first.

Okay, so hotlinking is the wrong terminology to use. Do you think embedding images is taken into account by Google?

For example, would Google see spammy sites embedding lots of images, and therefore use it as an indicator of spam?

Surely that only works if it's an actual link, right? Simply using the tag shouldn't be regarded as a link by Google?

Hi,

There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person.

I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO.

The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains.

We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs?

Thanks,

James

Great, thanks for the info. I always thought Google was really hot on compliance, but good to know there is a bit of leeway.

Our website uses a custom built CMS, but uses a fairly standard WYSIWYG text editor.

I've looked at some of the code it produces, and it's not pretty. My gut feeling tells me that this extra bloat is bad for SEO.

Am I right in thinking that Google doesn't look kindly upon badly formatted and bloated HTML?

Thanks,
James