Referral Spam

[bettinganalyst]

Hi Folks,

We are suffering from a lot of referral spam in the last few days. We have gone through analytics to stop this, and maybe it's working to a degree. But new ones keep popping up, so we are keen to put a full brake on this--- Any of you guys suffering the same? We are told to expect this now that we get previews on page one of google, from others trying to slow us down. we also have a good idea of who could be doing this. Maybe we should reciprocate, since that's what our webmaster is suggesting!

Is this just part of everyday life? What should we be doing extra to stop this?

Thanks!

[xecutable]

I got these a lot lately, mostly by Russian websites. The things I see on Analytics is 4webmasters dot org, that links to some analyze site called ranksonic dot com. The other one trafficmonetize dot org, is blocked by browsers for spam. The rest look also seowannabe sites. Whether someone is doing it intentionally i don't know could care less.

[golfbettingsystem]

There was a recent thread on this with some suggestions, worth a look: https://www.gpwa.org/forum/analytics...am-222426.html

[universal4]

If they are seo-wannabe sites they are likely hosting some sort of "app" that scans your site for competitors, looking for seo signals and ranking your site for them, and then scrapes your pages, houses the content in a database and displays it on THEIR websites.

Personally I think Google should dump and ban every single one of that type of sites since they all end up having thousands and thousands of pages of other peoples content from scraped pages.

Did you personally give them permission to scrape and database your site? Nope your competition did.

Rick
Universal4

[Casinorep]

I also get a quite a lot from russian sites. Not sure if disavowing does any good but I've tried.

[Lucky13]

I'm seeing the same thing and from 4webmasters dot org too..

I read somewhere that refferer spam can be to get a site to link back but can't see that can happen on our site since we don't publish any refferer statistics.. Is this something we need to do something about?

[xecutable]

That mirror links to some new coming SEO brand called RankSonic, I actually sent them a tweet, let's see if they can explain this. In fact I did a little digging myself and found this http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12...gle-analytics/ that explains, how to block it, why they do it, how they do it etc etc.

[xecutable]

Just a little update: they had replied to me on twitter that 4webmaster is just a simple crawler that analyzes pages. What they didn't say is that it abuses the analytics bug and sends the referral tag, rather than showing up as a visitor.

P.S: "I've deleted both URLs from the base. Tell your colleagues to contact me, and I will remove the sites."

So anyone who is getting referral spam from 4webmasters can contact them on twitter @rank_sonic, so the URLs are removed from their crawler.

[universal4]

Well a simple google search of the term 4webmasters returned an interesting set of results.

Instead of them ranking fairly high in the results with their own website, 8 of the first 10 results were articles and complaints of how to block 4webmasters referral spam.

I did not search for those terms, (as my search string was ONLY 4webmasters) but it is VERY VERY clear thousands and thousand DO search for ways to block them, and Google knows this and returned results that pretty much PROVE that.

So if they would remove ALL the urls they have, I'd guess it would be a start to removing those urls that website owners actively seek to be removed.

Rick
Universal4

[xecutable]

This referral spam has now converted to Direct Traffic spam. It still comes from Russia, it still probably the same websites, but it just authenticates now as Direct Traffic. How do I filter this out?