Referral Spam (trafficmonetize.org, 4webmasters.org, etc)
-
So, we've been plagued with pretty much ALL of our clients from traffic from spammy websites, and even a porn site or two.
Here are a few examples:
- 4webmasters
- Floatingsharebuttons
- Trafficmonetize.org
- 100dollarseo
We are seeing our websites negatively impacted by this.
How could this be happening?
-
Hi there
There's really no way of telling without a link to your client's site.
Here's a great Q+A on StackExchange where users offer their ideas. Including...
They find new sites by:
- Crawling and looking for signatures of known software. Usually this is a snippet of text like a copyright or a meta tag but it could be any consistent identifier. This usually applies to blog and forum software.
- Manual inclusion. Human beings, whose labor is cheap in many parts of the world, look for known software or forms that are easily exploitable and add them to a database. This usually applies to custom registration and contact forms.
- They buy lists. Just like email addresses are sold by spammers, known vulnerable or preferred target site lists are sold as well.
So, it really could be a lot of things, but I wouldn't jump to inclusions. Just refer the resources above and start doing what you can!
Hope this helps a bit - good luck!
-
We had a client of ours get blacklisted because of porn links and this referral traffic. Could it have been done by a disgruntled employee? How do these things start?
-
I would recommend following Carlos Escalera comment on referral filters. I followed his process about a month back when I noticed ever increasing volumes of referral spam hitting our site.
His recent comment found here will give you an overview or you can follow the entire process on this article.
It worked a treat for me utilising both .htaccess to restrict spam crawlers and GA filters to clean up my traffic data.
-
Hi there
This sometimes just happens. Here are a couple of resources to help you clear this up in GA reporting and also how to block these spam bots altogether:
How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data (Moz)
Stop Ghost Spam in Google Analytics (Marcel Digital)Both provide tips for you and your web development team!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
How to handle a pure spam penalty (from GWT) as a blogging platform
Hello, I have a blogging platform which spammers unfortunately used a few years ago to create spam blogs. Since them, we've added spam filters and even if I can't not assume there isn't any spam blog left, I can say that most of the blogs are clean. The problem is, in Google Webmasters Tools, we have a Pure spam message in the Manual actions page. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en), with a list of 1000 blog links. All these blogs have been marked as spam in our system for at least 1 year, technically it means they return a 410 header and display something like "this blog doesn't meet our quality requirements". When I've first seen the manual action message in GWT, I have asked for reconsideration request. Google answered within a week saying that they had checked again our website, but when I go went to the manual actions page, there was still a "pure spam" message, with a different list of blogs, which have already been marked as spam for a year at least. What should I do ? Ask for reconsideration requests as long as Google answers ? Thank you in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingLouis0 -
Where does Schema.org Microdata go on a page?
Say you've got a Magento e-commerce site and you want to add Schema.org Microdata to it to take advantage of Google's Rich Snippets feature. Would the markup be part of the page's HTML TITLE . . . or somewhere in the bare-bones description (usually wrought by inputting data into separate fields in the CMS), e.g., Item: Something
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RScime25
Price: $00.00
Short Description: blah, blah, blah Or, hidden somewhere in the header? Or, can it be marked-up somewhere beneath my lengthy (and Panda-friendly) content and subsequently extracted by Google and highlighted in the SERPs? Admittedly, I'm more than a bit late to the Schema.org party and I'm a content-guy anyway; and not much good at under-the-hood stuff. I figure I'd better get my chops together, now. I've searched Moz.com's Q&A as well as Google's and Schema.org's and haven't come up with an answer yet that doesn't require that I learn a whole new vocabulary.0 -
We will be switching our shopping cart platform from volusion to magento and really cautious / nervous about our rankings / seo stuff. any advice for anyone that has migrated stores, etc. these urls are years old, etc.
shopping cart platform switch and SEO. What do you suggest? What's the best way to ensure we keep rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Can keyword in onpage links be seen as spam?
My seo strategy relies heavily on a lot of great relevant content on the domain. To achieve this, I have a section with 'information docs' on each product page. They are lists with links to informational pages relevant to the product. For instance; domain.com/apples/ On this product page there are 30 links to articles; domain.com/apples/how-to-store/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koenseo
domain.com/apples?recipes/ etc. The anchor texts of these links are the titles of these articles, so on the product page the list of links looks like this: How to store apples
Recipes with apples etc. Question: Are those keywords in the links (apples) counted as onpage keyword usage an can it be seen as keyword stuffing by Google? Thanks a lot.0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should I be deleting spam trackbacks/pingbacks?
I'm getting spammy trackbacks/pingbacks on my Wordpress site. Should I bother deleting these or do these count as backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
Query / Discussion on Subdomain and Root domain passing authority etc
I've seen Rands video on subdomains and best pratices at
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites I have a question/theory though and it is related to an issue I am having. We have built our website, and now we are looking at adding 3rd party forums and blogs etc (all part of one CMS). The problem is these need to to be on a seperate subdomain to work correctly (I won't go into the specific IT details but this is what I have been advised by my IT guru's). So I can have something like:
http://cms.mysite.com/forum/ Obviously after reading Rands post and other stuff this is far from ideal. However I have another Idea - run the CMS from root and the main website from the www. subdomain. EG
www.mysite.com
mysite.com/blog Now my theory is that because so many website (possibly the majority - especially smaller sites) don't use 301 redirects between root and www. that search engines may make an exception in this case and treat them both as the same domain, so it could possibly be a way of getting round the issue. This is just a theory of mine, based solely on my thoughts that there are so many websites out there that don't 301 root to www. or vice versa, that possibly it would be in the SE's self interest to make an exception and count these as one domain, not 2. What are your thoughts on this and has there been any tests done to see if this is the case or not? Thanks0 -
Does Schema.org markup require a HTML 5 doctype?
I would like to implement Schema/microdata on a clients website, but the site is currently XHTML. Is html5 required for the micro data tags to be recognised? Will it work if I implement micro data on my XHTML site? Thanks for any advice you can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cmaddison1