Why am i seeing google.inc in analytics as direct traffic? Bug?

[BlueWren]

Recently i have seen two clients sites see a spike in direct traffic coming from google.inc. Is this a bot/bug which i should filter out. Just a bit confused why google.inc has visited our clients site 676 times!

Any insight would be great.

[TimHolmes]

I have recently (in the last week) followed Carlos' OHow article on removing fake crawler and ghost referral traffic to help produce clean data. It is a great blog post and helped a lot.

Second to this, I was over on SEO Round Table earlier, apparently according to a Google hangout from John Mueller the Google Analytics team are aware of referral spam as an issue. Hopefully in the long run they will get on top of this issue.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-referrer-spam-20394.html

In the mean time Carlos' article below will help you set up filters and htaccess blocking of crawlers etc.

http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

[Carloseo]

You can see in this image the network used by free-buttons  and the amount of fake direct visits it leaves http://i.imgur.com/Kx4PD15.png . They started in middle May when the problem with fake direct visits began.

Campaign Source is the right way to exclude the referral. However, it won't stop the fake direct visits that free-buttons (and maybe others) leave. Ghost spam has changed, I have seen it in different forms referral (the most common), organic, events and the most confusing direct visits.

Another disadvantage of the Campaign Source solution is that everytime a new spam shows up you have to add to a filter, and by the time you add it you already have hits.

That's why I recommend the other solution with valid hostnames since ONE filter will prevent all ghost spam in any form.

Hope it helps,

http://i.imgur.com/Kx4PD15.png

[BlueWren]

Custom filter - Filter field- Campaign Source with a Regex filter pattern

[Carloseo]

What method are you using to filter free-social-buttons and the rest of the spam?

[BlueWren]

Hi Carlos,

Thanks for your response.I have already filtered out all the dodgy spam such as free-social-buttons. So it is not that. I have also checked my last few days and I have not had another visit from google inc. It seems like it just appeared for a month and has disappeared.

Just need to know if it is spam or not. Has anyone else seen direct visits come from google inc.?

[Carloseo]

If the hostname is "not set" or a fake one then is ghost spam most likely, if you check your referrals you will probably see free-social-buttons(might be others) this one I noticed that hits with fake direct visits along with the referral spam.

Conventional methods of stopping the spam like excluding the referral won't have any effect in the direct visit. To take care of all ghost spam, you should use a filter based on your hostname.

You can find more information on this related question

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

Hope it helps,

[BlueWren]

I have checked under Technology - Network and this is where it shows google.inc. Viewing under All Traffic-Channels and adding second dimension it does show not set. I have checked the source and medium and it says (direct)/(none).

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Have you also checked the medium and campaign parameters for this source? It could be that somebody is just messing with you and as you can use UTM to mess up every traffic source.

[Carloseo]

Hi Blue, in which dimension you are seeing google.inc? If you choose hostname as a second dimension do you see "not set"?