Why am i seeing google.inc in analytics as direct traffic? Bug?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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,
-
Custom filter - Filter field- Campaign Source with a Regex filter pattern
-
What method are you using to filter free-social-buttons and the rest of the spam?
-
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.?
-
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
Hope it helps,
-
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).
-
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.
-
Hi Blue, in which dimension you are seeing google.inc? If you choose hostname as a second dimension do you see "not set"?
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
-
Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely. The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following: Browser size visits: 620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5. Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted. If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
How would I create this type of report in Google Analytics?
I work for an e-commerce site. I would like to run a weekly report to see what every category pages increase and decrease for pageviews would be. How would I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can i know trough Google analytics the most busy time in the day ?
Hello guys,
Reporting & Analytics | | WayneRooney
I have a website with around 600-650 visitor a day.
Can i know trough Google analytics the most busy time in the day ? Thank you0 -
Testing IP Exclusion Filters in Google Analytics
(I hope I haven't missed something simple 😉 I have add IP exclusion filters in Google Analytics. What I haven't been able to determine is how to test to see if it is working. I'd imagine there would be a dip in traffic but if a site is low volume it might not even register. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | AUDigitalMarketing0 -
Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source
I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013. it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns - on a regular basis. it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns. is it possible that it is a cookie issue? - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources. Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | S.S.N0 -
Where do I find Google Analytics link tracking for outbound links?
We implemented this script in source, where would I find the outbound link tracking; in Events?
Reporting & Analytics | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Multiple Domain Tracking with One Google Analytics Account
I am working on multiple online retail stores as follow. Right now, I have tracking facility with multiple account. Attached image can give you more idea about it. http://www.vistastores.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit
http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/
http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/ I don't want to track my statistics with multiple account. Because, it may take too much time behind Goal set up as well as analysis. Can I track all data under one account for all online retail stores? 6464019053_bda32e9fe0_b.jpg0 -
Ideas Why Our Google News Traffic Disappearing?
The traffic to our major market newspaper website from Google News has dropped nearly 100% in the past ten days. Any ideas why might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | wlis990