Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
-
Hi!
My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage.
I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
-
believe I found a hint
opensiteexplorer linking pages: limboland.net
| *.limboland.net/
| Top Linking Pages | Page Authority |
| http://business.limboland.net/factoring/delaware_llc/delaware_llc.html | 29 || 39 | 281 |
Anchor text linking to some page on https://www.delawareinc.com/
| your story heidi lowe gallery,1,6 |
Query Google if the phrase with myamar girls etc is indexed for the limbo land site:
myanmar girls site:http://limboland.net/
See the smoking gun? This site links to yours and uses the exact keywords and is a doubtful site at best.
I would disavow this entire website.
Hope this helps.
Gr Daniel
-
Thanks for all the advice and help! I'm still digging, but I noticed that our PPC ads are surfacing on pages that are on SERPs for those particular terms. It may be some kind of wonky Analytics tracking.
-
Hate to quit but without any specifics it's not sensible to search more thorough and I would like to second the remark by Marks Ginsberg. But if you do I would love to take another look into it. Nothing like some could old investigating I always say.
-
I got nothing :D... sorry..
-
Unfortunately, no. Thank you for investigating though!
-
Does this query contain any site you might know?
-
Can you give us the URL of the site in question to take a peek ourselves - I'm know rather curious about what is going on here
-
Thanks, Keri! I did a fetch and the code looks fine. Still searching...
-
Thanks Mark and Daniel! I'll give it a go in OSE. I've been sticking to Analytics and GWT but it seems like it's time to branch out.
-
Thanks, Keri! I couldn't find anything via this method or good old fashioned search. It's a bit baffling that Analytics says it's coming from search when I can't find any results in search.
-
If your using WordPress I believe there is a way to exclude keywords so your site doesn't show up for certain keywords.
-
dns and domain hijack? Mm... Then I would advice to hire a security expert. Not a SEO.
-
That was actually the first thing I did when I was going to answer, but I didn't feel educated enough to answer the question. The correlation I could find is there is a company that publishes a news paper by the same name (the other companies name is an exact match on their domain name) that has written articles about Myanmar, but I don't know if that would influence anything since they do not have links on the page. If so, this is an area of SEO I haven't explored before.
-
The OP stated that these are keywords drawing traffic to the site, not referral traffic. Therefore, people are typing these keywords into a search engine and finding the site directly via the keywords.
It could be that the search engines are seeing a hacked version of the site that visitors don't see. Look at the landing pages for these keywords, then fetch those pages as Googlebot from Google Webmaster Tools.
-
yes but that's to easy and where is the fun in it:-) But could also fast become a case of chasing ghosts and shadows it it originates from websites with millions of pages?
-
So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:
site:mysite.com badkeyword
and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.
-
Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.
You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.
Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.
Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.
Sincerely,
Mark
-
Do suspicious domains show up in referring domains in the opensiteexplorer? Also if you connect the moz pro dash with Analytics it will start to pick up on landing pages receiving traffic. These would eventually show up as landing pages? But then they would somethimes need a keyword provided by Google. That could take a while.
And if not they must surely be logged on the webserver log files?
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
-
Leveraging A Second Site
Hi, A client of mine has an opportunity to buy/control another site in the same niche. The client's site is the top-ranked site for the niche. The second site is also often top half of page one. The second site has a 15 year old design that is a really bad, almost non-functional, user experience and thin content. The client's site (site 1) has the best link profile and dominates organic search, but the second site's link profile is as good as our nearest competitor's link profile. Both sites have been around forever. Both sites operate in the affiliate marketing space. The client's site is a multi million dollar enterprise. If the object were to wring the most ROI out of the second site, would you: A) Make the second site not much more than a link slave to the first, going through the trouble to keep everything separate, including owner, hosting, G/A, log-on IPs, so as not to devalue the links to 1st site, etc? Or... B) Develop the second site and not worry about hiding that both are the same owner. Or... C) Develop the second site and still worry about it keeping it all hidden from Google. Or... D) Buy the second site and forward the whole thing to site 1. I know the white hat answer is "B," but would like to hear considerations for these options and any others. Thanks! P.S., My pet peeve is folks who slam a fast/insufficient answer into an unanswered question, just to be the first. So, please don't.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Is this site buying backlinks?
dankstop.com Almost all of their links come from mainly the same few sites, and some of their links have a really high spam score.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tlorenzi0 -
Bot or Virus Creating Bad Links?
Hey Everyone, We are getting ready to engage a client for some potential marketing/SEO so in preparing for this have ran the site through OpenSiteExplorer. The site is relatively new and there are only two links under the inbound links section. They are relevant and add value, no issues there. Here is where it get strange. When I look under the 'Just Discovered' section there are many (hundreds) new links going back about a month. Virtually all of them have the anchor text 'Louis Vuitton outlet'. Now the client swears he has not engaged anyone for black hat SEO, so wondering who could possibly be creating these links. They do sell some Louis Vuitton items on the site, so I'm wondering if it is possible that some spam bot has picked up the site and began to spam the web with links to the clients site. So far today, 50 or so new links have been created with said anchor text and the clients root URL all on very poor quality, some foreign blog sites. Would like to find out why this is happening and put a stop to it for obvious reasons. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be a bot? Or maybe someone with an axe to grind against the client? Anyone could be doing this on their own, but just seems strange for it to be happening to a new site that does not even rank highly at the moment. Any advice or info is greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Whebb0 -
Penguin 2.1 Penalty- Can't Understand why hit by it?
Hi, I have lost all my rankings after Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't did anything wrong. Want to know the root cause of the penalty so that I can overcome this. Any help would be appreciated. Website: http://tiny.cc/hfom4w
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chandman0 -
Can i send a disavow if a detect a spam link
I have detected than one web domain is generating 2400 links to my site should a use a disavow tools, as it is imposible to have contact from webmaster and no response to your emails My web as not been warned or penalized, but i dont like this link, and i want to inform google of that,. If google acepts the disavow file, should i still see on my webmaster tools that web links, or will they desapear thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0 -
How much pain can I expect if I change the URL structure of the site again?
About 3 months ago I implemented a massive URL structure change by 'upgrading' some of the features of our CMS Prior to this URL's for catergorys and products looked something like this http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=OX09 I made a few changes but din't implement it fully as I felt it would be better to do it instages as the site was getting indexed more thouroughly. HOWEVER... We have just hit the first page for some key SERP's and I am wary to rock the boat again by changing the URL structures again and all the sitemaps. How much pain do you think we could feel if i went ahead and optimised the URL's fully? and What would you do? 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Linking Profile Gone Bad?!
Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links. It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam. Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tqinet0