Spamming Google Analytics with Back Links
As a website designer and SEO consultant I manage many different websites with Google Analytics. Most of these sites are totally unrelated with the exception that I had built them.
So it was quite surprising to suddenly notice a new referral link to many of these sites from the same place.
More surprisingly, traffic had come through this new back link in the same period to several different websites, sometimes even on the same day and at no other time.
Even more surprising is the content of the website that was referring traffic to some of my sites:
slowfoodottawagatineau.org
slowfoodottawagatineau.org is a website that appears to be about the quality of food being downgraded by fast food restaurants, based in the US and Canada.
Now, admittedly, I have completed websites for two restaurants but they are both based in the UK and have zero connections with the slow food company. There is clearly something strange occurring and some further research is needed.
Following the referral back links
Having entered the referring link into my browser and discovered the above website has zero to do with any of the sites I have built, I decided look around the slowfoodottawagatineau.org website in search of where the actual links to my sites are. I found nothing. Even a search of the sites source code found no links to any of my sites.
So why and how is this site linking to mine?
It appears that this a new kind of SEO spamming that displays a referral link in your analytics to query, when doing so you are becoming a new visitor of the site that sent it, thus adding yourself to the growing amount of traffic that site is now receiving. By providing a link to your site, they are also likely to be hoping that you may link to their site in return. This gives the SEO consultant of this project evidence of their ‘work’ therefor justifying their charges.
It’s cheeky but is it damaging?
From what I can see, it appears not. It can affect your SEO analytics by rasing bounce rates and lowering time spent on your site which can be a problem.
The solution? I suggest not clicking the link or putting it into your address bar and definately do not feel obliged to link back to it. This will give the dodgy SEO consultant what they are aiming for. Also, try filtering the site altogether from your analytics so it doesn’t mess up your statistics.
Be aware that these spamming back links come in two forms:
- slowfoodottawagatineau.org
- www.slowfoodottawagatineau.org
Huh. I was wondering about that. Thanks for posting.
Just had the same trickery from these two sites. Hope it is really just a way to get web masters’ visits.
I too received link backs from this site, thanks for the info!
I have the same problem, thanks for the info.
Thanks for this post, just noticed referrals from this site in the past two day, however I did click on the link and visit the site
hope there’s no adverse side effect! Will filtering the sites IP address from my analytics solve the problem or just mask it by eliminating from visible analytics info?
Thanks for the research, chief. Got a ton of traffic from them this morning. Thought I was suddenly very popular. Apparently not.
7 hits in two days. This is annoying…….
Same here, all my sites were visited about 6 – 10 times.
Could this also be some competitor buying spammy backlinks to damage my rep? How do these things work? I got other links from random sites that are low quality and have nothing to do with my website.
Same here…I saw I had visits from all over the world from this site..checked it out and found nothing. It’s really annoying
Me too. Strange. Thought my traffic was spiking for a moment there
Merci pour ce post, nous aussi allons bloquer cette adresse IP
Interesting. We just did a quick check and found similar links for our site, thanks for sharing
I had 11 hits come from the same website, checked it out, and couldn’t find anything out of place. It was still bothering me, I’m glad to know what the deal is, thanks.
Can anyone tell me exactly how to filter out the sites from Google Analytics? Thanks kindly. -Julie
Hi Julie,
On the profile you want to filter…where you normally click “View Reports” – look across to the right side where it says “EDIT”…
Scroll down to where it says “ADD FILTER”
You can then filter by IP address and domain names… do both domain names and apparently this IP address for this site is 95.211.47.61
Good luck!
Tracy
Thanks for the info. To answer your question Julie, click on the gear symbol at the top right of the analytics screen when you have a site selected and you’ll get a selection of tabs one of which is called Filters. Create an ‘Exclude Filter’ on the IP address 95.211.47.61. It’s self explanatory when you get there.
If you need to put the filter on other sites you can do the same thing by selecting an existing filter so give it a name you can recognise.
Hope that helps
Thanks for the comments guys.
I would be interested to know Google’s stance on this – has anyone had any correspondence with them about it?
Ryan
Thanks everyone! I excluded the following from my dashboards:
slowfoodottawagatineau.org
http://www.slowfoodottawagatineau.org
95.211.47.61
However, I am still seeing this referral in my data. Is this only going to exclude them going forward?
Thanks kindly.
Julie
Ha, thank you for figuring this out! The slow food site is showing up in most of my website analytics. Wonder who theor SEO company is so they can be outed. While it isn’t damaging, it lacks integrity!
This happened to me as well, thanks for posting. I’ll try to create a filter.
I have the same problem too and thanks for the info.
I have noticed it as well…Pretty tricky tactics. Only noticeable in Google Analytics accounts that aren’t receiving a lot of traffic. If they improve and can ping big sites heavily, this could be an entire new problem that the Google Analytics and other analytics teams will have to start fighting.
This happened to me also …. could this in any way affect your search engine ranking?
My site was, at one point, in the top ten search results but all of a sudden it just disappeared.
just also noticed that I had a spike of visitors from slowfoods on 17/12/11 and just after this … my site disappeared from google on around the 18/12/11
@chris and anyone else reading this, filter from the Analytics is one thing, but google uses bounce rates to determine if your website should be ranked higher or lower. If you get a ton of bounces (they hit your home page and leave) google takes this into account over time, and new websites with little traffic will take the largest hit, as you may have 40 total monthly visits, but 20 from this “joker” and google sees that 50% of the people that hit your website leave. I also have all me sites hit with this, but only my brand new ones dropped in SERP. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_results_page)
They are also hiding behind cloudDNS.net so it makes it harder to track them down.
Heh! Ya! Me too!
On one of my sites, I have a page *for* link exchange. It certainly draws in lots & lots of riff-raff like this slow-food thing.
My client often sends me link exchange emails that come in from these (mostly) foreigners and only about 10% of them are legitimate. (if that)
It’s funny cos they make these sites that “appear” to be actual sites, but they are not and it blows my mind that webmasters fall for it and post/link there, because I’ve read that it *hurts* your SEO to link with sites that are not legitimate and this new Farmer/Panda thing google is doing, I’m sure, will penalize them somehow.
I’m not out to get you to send me your money. I don’t care about that. What I *DO* care about is making sure my clients get the traffic they deserve and I really appreciate pages like this one from you, ri-web. I might make a webmaster forum similar in the near future.
Thank you, ri-web!
Hi Rental,
thanks for the info … I’m wondering how they get to know about new sites? the only directory that i’m listed in was the attracta business directory…are any of you guys on this?
http://www.attracta.com/directory/
the same thing happened to me again yesterday from a different source forex-ninjas.com
I’ve got the http://www.forex-ninjas.com as well…
I’ve also had this same problem with slowfoodottawagatineau.org
and also with forex-ninjas.com, as you, Chris.
Miroslav
I got backlinks in analytics from these 2 sites as well.
However: slowfoodottawagatineau DID link back to my site at the time the backlink appeared in GA, in the hope (presumably) that I would link back. Since I didn’t, they removed the link from their site.
It reminds me of those people doing “follow-unfollow” on Twitter.