Hi Frank. Here are a couple posts on this: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/, an update of: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/. That should clarify it for you. There are pros and cons obviously, but that should give you the full scope.
Posts made by RyanPurkey
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RE: Call Tracking numbers effect on Local SEO
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RE: An SEO Strategy (need review)
Here's some more ideas: http://www.inman.com/2015/02/20/5-steps-to-creating-viral-real-estate-blog-posts/ and http://neilpatel.com/2014/12/30/how-to-build-high-quality-backlinks-in-a-scalable-way/
It is possible, but you have to come up with ways to do it. The more you try to 'build links' the harder it'll be to get the site ranking well.
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RE: Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Read: http://moz.com/blog/most-important-link-penalty-removal-tool-your-mindset. Very much so. Google knows what a natural link profile looks like so well that you're best bet is gaining external links as naturally as possible. Sites with super high percentages of anchor text links, followed links, and conversion page specific links are running red flags in front of Google's eyes. Take Eric's advice from above. Cheers!
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RE: Early Feb Update?
I don't think the typo redirects are an issue. Even Google uses those: http://gooogle.com. What percentage of your visits is referrer traffic or direct? If you're at 90% from search any of these swings are going to hurt a lot more. Getting higher rates of referrer and direct would help buffer search, and they also indicate a much higher likelihood of not dropping from search due to brand strength. I work with some more niche ecommerce sites that saw no adverse effects, but also have balanced brand strengths so wherever possible work on strengthening those as well.
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RE: Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Like Hutch says, chances are Screaming Frog is doing a straight read of those pages without factoring in CSS rules for non display of the irrelevant content per device. To double check you could pull up Google's cached version of your pages and see what they're displaying there. Cheers!
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RE: Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
As Leonie states, the search engines are for public facing content. If your site is completely private then you'd be more interested in making sure it's not found anywhere other than by members, however it sounds like you have some aspects of the site that could be public or created to attract new members. Typically in these cases you pull small topical samples from the site that are shown to benefit the members and help articulate why membership is valuable. It may be a matter of having what is practically like two sites: the public facing, membership recruitment site, and the private, non-indexed membership site. Cheers!
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RE: An SEO Strategy (need review)
Ok. So basically you're creating a distributed archive of all this footage. The trick for you though is to figure out how people might be interested in using and interacting with the content. That will go a lot farther in terms of links and engagement than just the profiles.
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RE: Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Like EGOL mentions, going after unnaturally long links--and the type of copy that falls afield of some of the Adwords policy--is likely to cause issues in your work to aggressively link internally. What is fine is remaining factual and linking to your 'green widgets' page with the link, 'green widgets'. Just look at Wikipedia's level of internal linking...
Leave the best of stuff to review sites or pages.
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RE: An SEO Strategy (need review)
For me the bigger question is how does this content engage users? Are the videos and images something they could use through a Creative Commons license? Are they photos that could be tied into some other uses? Ultimately you want your content to build links for you. Cheers!
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RE: Google News Bug
You should be able to see the google news page in more detail within Analytics by clicking through to it's details. That referrer should still have your article on it, well a blurb of your article.
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RE: Google News Bug
Have you identified what exact article is sending traffic to you via Google News? It sounds like a portion of your site was picked up as news worthy. 400 daily visits isn't a lot for a large number of sites and is typical of getting a page or site to go viral.
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RE: Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
The chances of the product page getting inbound links is better if the size variations are on the same page. That way if someone links to you as having air filter 10x20x1 you could also get a link to that page from a person looking for 10x20x2.
On the page itself you can have pictures and copy displaying the various sizes. With how much Google clusters based on similarity you're better off with as strong a page as possible versus lots of low strength ones.
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RE: How to get Root Domain backlinks with OSE
Hi. The Mozbar number that you've circled appears to be counting the hundreds of 301 redirects in use on your site into its total link number. OSE has clustered those into a group that caps out 25 links per domain. A full backlink report in your case would require you to export your 301 redirects and add them to the total of OSE links, but that wouldn't tell you any more than you already know. You'll get better insights if you compare your site to your search competition and see where they've gained links from a diversity of domains. Cheers!
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RE: Open Site Explorer is finding old html Files that havn't been on my site in two years... even after a 301 Redirect. HELP!
I don't know if you're looking at the right thing...
- Your site is listing in Google if you check with a site:morganlindsayphotography.com search, so that's current.
- Plus DNS tools show that your site is pointing to the correct nameservers: https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/morganlindsayphotography.com.
- Further, there aren't any pages listed that are your old 'html' style: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Amorganlindsayphotography.com+inurl%3Ahtml.
- And I'm seeing pages that have been crawled as recently as February: site search with "past month" selected from search tools.
- If you're in Google Webmaster Tools and go to Google Index >> Index Status, you'll see a running timeline of how many pages Google has in their index up to recent dates.
Starting a new domain and rebuilding your site would be a bad idea as it would only delay OSE further.
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RE: Open Site Explorer is finding old html Files that havn't been on my site in two years... even after a 301 Redirect. HELP!
Wow. Well the good news is that I see a sitemap at http://www.morganlindsayphotography.com/sitemap.xml which seems accurate to your current site. If you submit that within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing that will help refresh pages there.
The other aspect of all this stuff is getting more external links, so feel free to link up your social profiles: linkedin, twitter, facebook, etc. to point back to your site as your home page. You can announce new blog posts via twitter as well. You can also link up photography orientated sites like 500px, flickr, dphoto, and so on to point back to your main site as your home page within your profile. All this should help update the other services as they crawl those sites.
The other aspect is local sites, like Google + Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Facebook and others. Moz Local covers many of them. Each of those also offers a place for you to point to your main site.
Updating throughout there should get you up to speed in no time. Plus David gave you the inside info on your site's status in OSE, so you should be set. Cheers!
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RE: Duplicate Blog pages across different domains
Duplicate content isn't supposed to have an SEO benefit. Thats why you're supposed to use rel canonical so your users visiting one blog can read the article as a usability feature while the search engines wan to know which one to rank. They're not interested in ranking all three of your identical articles. From their perspective it's a negative not a positive.
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RE: Duplicate Blog pages across different domains
HI Anddrei. You'll definitely want to clean up the duplicate content either through rewrites or noindex / follow along with canonical tags on the one post that you do keep with the others pointing to that page as the canonical version.
Lastly, mentally don't plan on the duplicate content adding any SEO boost as distributing the exact same article across a variety of networks either through something like the old style of press releases or through domains you own is considered manipulative by the engines. Cheers!
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RE: Suspected hacking - Google has detected that some of your pages may contain hidden text or cloaking
Kari nailed it. You'll want to clean up those pages and secure your site. Services like:
stopthehacker.com
sitelock.com
cloudflare.com
website-guardian.comcan help prevent your site from being hacked in the future. Cheers!
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RE: Akamai's Edge Redirector good for SEO?
Hi Woj. I've yet to use that, but conceptually it sounds like it would work as part of platform that's already using a delivery solution: "Edge Redirector requires a delivery solution and works in concert with other Akamai Intelligent Platform capabilities." If the server based .htaccess is becoming very large and a bottle neck to serving pages globally, I'd consider it.
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RE: Social widgets, iFrames, Duplicate content and more...
As Monica mentions, this is questionable as to whether or not it'll be seen as content on your page, since it's embedded in an iFrame. Here's Google's take on it: "Pages that use frames or iframes display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. Google tries to associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we don't guarantee that we will." From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445.
There's not much of a worry about duplicate content with this practice, and many white hat, legitimate websites import comments and twitter feeds. The only cautions on penalties would be the standard, "avoid bad neighborhoods" or spammy social profiles in your comment stream. Cheers!
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RE: Just Discovered Links not appearing in main index
There are a few different things going on here. Just discovered links are separate from the main OSE index, "This report is driven by a new SEOmoz index that is independent from the Mozscape index, and is populated with URLs that are shared on Twitter," from: http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-just-discovered-links-report, and is a function of the Moz Fresh Web Explorer. For those links to then go into OSE they have to be added to the overall index and processed as part of the next update. With both tools though you're able to interact quickly with new links, while accomplishing long term planning with OSE and its competitor comparison features. Here's the location of the update schedule: http://moz.com/products/api/updates
And Rand's latest Q&A about what the last update (Jan 27) accomplished: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here
As long as your links from just discovered get crawled and recorded by OSE, eventually they'll show up. Cheers!
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RE: Open Site Explorer is finding old html Files that havn't been on my site in two years... even after a 301 Redirect. HELP!
Hi Morgan. Your updates look good. One thing with OSE is that it doesn't update instantaneously and is actually refreshed on a monthly schedule or so which means any changes you make that work well in Google and on your site will take a while to get recorded in OSE. Did you try checking your site in the webmaster tools Google and Bing offer? Uploading the current sitemap should help clear things up further. The latest update is scheduled for March 11th at which time you might see this information updated, see: http://moz.com/products/api/updates for past information and this post discussing OSE: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here in more detail.
There are also some other backlink checking tools out there such as Ahrefs and Majestic that are useful for finding even more links. Mostly OSE is suited for checking the link profile of several competitors and getting ideas one where else you can market your site. For example, if you know of some other photography sites that are ranking highly you can add them into OSE and begin to see what they've done and how you could improve. Your current work looks fine though so you should be good to go. Cheers!
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RE: Is there any benefit of having a .tv tld instead of a .com for a video centric website?
Google itself bought the exclusive rights to the .app TLD so there's that in the custom TLD column, but like you and others say here, .tv isn't one like that.
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RE: Linking Root Domains www and non-www
If you have a 301 redirect in place pointing the non-www to the www (or vice versa) you won't be losing link value from either link. You should also put both versions in Goggle Webmaster Tools and set your preferred domain there to further cement which one is the defacto URL. See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
Contacting people linking to you can be good in and of itself if as that can further the relationship. They might have ideas for more content they'd like to see on your site, or insights into what they like.
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RE: I am looking to find the top pages based on traffic volume on my competitors websites, does anyone know of any good resources?
Finding the exact numbers on this will probably be unlikely without access to their analytics, but you can get a guesstimate by seeing which of their pages are used as site links when you search for their brand in Google. You can also derive some guesses via search rankings by dividing out a percentage of clicks based on ranking from total search volumes.
Still, you're going to be missing a lot of data by not knowing how well they're doing in terms of email marketing, social, referrers, etc. Companies that try to accomplish this are ones like Compete and Quantcast. A better way to go about finding popularity by topic though would be to use a tool like Google Trends, Twitter Trending, etc.
As for time on page, why? You'll be better off focusing all your efforts there on your own site's usability, experience and customer satisfaction.
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RE: Old Press Release sites - Which ones do you Disavow and leave alone
Stephen Kenwright wrote a nice post on this in November, "Should You Disavow Links From Press Releases?
You absolutely should be adding press release sites to your disavow file. Google stated in 2012 that links from press releases won’t help your rankings, so there should be no danger in disavowing old press releases." From: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2383492/press-releases-are-not-an-seo-strategyThe entire post is good and will provide you guidance on working with the press in the future. For your specific case though if a bunch of press release sites were used in a manipulative link manner, feel free to disavow. Cheers!
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RE: MozLocal Listing Results
Here's one bit from the help page (https://moz.com/local/how#faq-check
The answer to this question depends on the case, but generally speaking, your score might stop short of your goal if you are simultaneously using a service other than Moz Local to publish your listings or have not added enhanced data like photo URLs and a minimum of three relevant categories to your listings.
Check to make sure that your listing is as complete as possible and you should be on your way to moving the score up. Cheers!
Edit: Full page on Average Score here: http://moz.com/help/guides/local/local-reporting.
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RE: First click free
This is mostly a Google News implementation as discussed here: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543, and could be tricky to make effective within real estate listings. Is your coverage of the market so complete that people have to view your site? Or could they easily find an alternative?
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RE: Sub-Domain Google Search Nested under main Domain?
Within Webmaster Tools you could possibly exclude the subdomain pages from being listed as site links, but Google has stated they're trying to get better at associating when subdomains are similar to subfolders on a site. Rand recently discussed that aspect of it here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
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RE: Is there any benefit of having a .tv tld instead of a .com for a video centric website?
None that I know of. Most of the optimization tools available can be used on any domain. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80472.
Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.
A .tv won't enhance the ability for Google to find your videos, but proper tagging and sitemapping will. Cheers!
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RE: Can reporting be whitelable with Pro version on our site for clients?
With Medium levels and above you can have "Branded Reports" which allow you to add your own logo to the reports. See: http://moz.com/products/pricing.
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RE: Mobile friendly - Sub domain after responsive?
To make it a little less of a coin toss, if the responsive site is delivering an even better user experience than the mobile website, redirecting the subdomain could be a benefit. You'd want to have solid split testing data from uniform groups of users, but if the directions point to responsive over m.website.com it could make since to go with the responsive site as the sole experience.
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RE: Mobile Usability update mobile and desktop versions
Hi Denise. With the clients that have a mobile version you're banking on the m.website.com ranking for mobile while the non-m site ranks for desktop search. Ideally you should see the m version rise in parallel with any declines in the desktop site on mobile platforms. There should also be mobile detection and redirection in place that serves the m-version if someone with a mobile browser visits the desktop site.
For clients without a mobile version, yes, they should work on setting that up soon as Google has made this a clear direction via Webmaster Tools. Cheers!
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RE: My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
Right. That's due to updating after the Open Site Explorer update. Once Moz recrawls your site it will apply the changes and you'll see the numbers as they were previously. It sounds like you've made these changes VERY recently. Any redirection of pages (even if they're on the same domain) take a bit of time to be fully recognized by search engines and Moz's OSE.
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RE: Redirect 301 & Wild Cards
Excellent! It matches up nicely with the example you provided, and always good to have someone on hand to make sure everything works as intended. Glad you found a good one.
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RE: Are directory websites still worth considering?
Local directories are certainly stronger than ever with their integration into mobile, mapping results, and GPS targeted user behavior, so by all means consider using local listings wherever applicable with a client.
Directory pages on industry specific websites are also a great place for links and create topical associations and trust even if they're not keyword targeted.
General all inclusive directories have fallen by the wayside over the years as user behavior has gone less from something akin to tv-like channel surfing to targeted search and acquire usage. But like you mention in your question, and above, in the right context, directories are still strong. Just the more focused the better. Cheers!
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RE: High qualitty images and mobile
With modern mobile devices their screens are actually pretty good at displaying high resolution images, but responsive design still helps significantly in squeezing layouts into handy formats across platforms. The crew at Distilled wrote a nice post about this a couple of years ago that's still applicable, here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design.
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RE: Are new pages treated similar to new domains with respect to ranking?
This is a big, "It depends," sort of question, but in general new pages are experiencing the benefits of established domains in both traffic to that domain (and thus potential new links coming from people visiting the new pages), the inherit DA of the domain that can be associated with pages on the domain, and benefits derived from other marketing channels to the domain as a whole. To keep it short, while a new domain has to establish every facet of it's authority and trust, a new page on a domain with lots of authority and trust will be established much faster. Cheers!
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RE: Client wants a seperate .tv domain for their media/videos instead of a subdomain/subfolder. What is the best way to pass of link equity to a new domain?
Yup! Especially at the expense of creating a new domain for content that could benefit the established domain.
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RE: Client wants a seperate .tv domain for their media/videos instead of a subdomain/subfolder. What is the best way to pass of link equity to a new domain?
Excellent insights as usual EGOL. As a handy way to look at companies currently using the '.tv' TLD there's always this search: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3A.tv Cheers!
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RE: What is your experience with markups (schema.org) in terms of SEO and best practice learnings?
Like you say, there are going to be different things to emphasize per vertical, but here are three resources to help get you started.
- http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data Moz's intro to Structured Data.
- http://moz.com/ugc/getting-the-most-out-of-schemaorg-microformats A nice Youmoz post on implementation
- http://www.stateofdigital.com/schema-org-best-practices/ Some best practices
The schema.org markups are designed to increase and diversify over time, so you'll likely have to search through them to find the best fits for your clients. Cheers!
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RE: Help tracking phone number calls from Google Plus & Yahoo Local
You could use one number universally on your site and local listings in order to match NAP, but then use the alternate number as a way to do call tracking and set that one as preferred. Other options include survey samplings, extensions, or integrating with a CRM if your business involves inside sales and someone who would be taking down that information.
Trying to track by every different service might be a bit of a headache though, as you could conceivably have a different number for every single site: Yelp, Superpages, Foursquare, and so on... Maybe it'd be worthwhile to just coalesce them all as "online local listings". Cheers!
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RE: My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
How recently have you made these changes? Have you also utilized the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools? PA changes per OSE update, so if you ran these changes after the last update, you won't see new numbers until the next release: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (March 11th) Cheers!
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RE: Link Building Companies
Hi Aimee. If applicable, you can also build quite a few white hat links by working with a quality PR team. It's a higher priced option yet can drive a decent amount of referrer as well as link traffic.
On the more direct scale, responding to customer inquires via social and forums is a great way to build links as well as you're able to link directly back to your site in a way that answers their questions.
In general, Google is moving in a fact checking based direction, so the quality of your content will only become more and more important if you're in that field, see: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VPOejUIVNbn and http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329832.700-googles-factchecking-bots-build-vast-knowledge-bank.html#.VPP8l0IVNbk. Cheers!
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RE: Sharing Facebook Comments Across Other Social Sites. Is It Okay?
It'd be a good idea to contact the customer and ask for their permission first, and if everything is a go it's fine to promote the positive review. It could also make a nice addition to a page where you collect them, if you have something up and running like that. Cheers!
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RE: I added competitors website information. How quickly do I see results.. like links and keywords?
The latest update is scheduled for Thursday but you should have seen some updates via email regarding the crawl and completion of your campaign. Chances are you'll see further data once you've completed a Thursday week to week cycle currently. Cheers!
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RE: Facebook plugin comments and SEO
In order to make comments indexable they have to be exported via script to the page in question. Are you talking about this blog post? http://moz.com/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines. As far as I know it still applies.
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RE: Large sites linking to us in their menu
This doesn't look like a manipulative or paid link on your part, but is in the correct section on a relevant domain and in proximity to other forums on the same topic. It should be fine.
Are you trying to deal with a manual action in your GWT account?
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RE: No cache still a good link for disavow?
Sure. Feel free to disavow and block that one. There was a recent well done blog post here on malware / spam referrer sites that could further help you: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data. Cheers!