A letter to our clients, and anyone interested.
The internet community has been experiencing a phenomena for years that up till now has only been generally annoying, but not a significant issue, Ghost Spam. This is now getting to be a serious issue, and we are working to get ahead of the curve on it for you.
Ghost Spam consists of automated bits of software that report that they have visited your site directly to google analytics, and they may have never actually visited your site. It’s junk traffic. Frequently the traffic never happened.
There are issues with this though.
First, you think you have more traffic coming to your site, and you don’t. You might decide something you are doing is working because you see improved traffic and make inappropriate decisions about a strategy. Worse, you might think your site is gaining traction, and getting more traffic, and therefore you don’t need to promote it as hard, or at all. After all, just look traffic is up.
The next problem is that this traffic is on your site for a fraction of a second, usually views only one page, and the ghost traffic leaves again. Now Google looks at both time on site and bounce rate. If people spend a lot of time on your site, Google figures, “Hey, this site must be relevant, let me give it more search love” If people come to your site and leave immediately (bounce) then Google figures “Hey, people that come to your site are not finding what they are looking for, so you must not be relevant” and Google takes away your search juice. This Ghost Traffic is decreasing your overall time on site, and increasing your bounce rate. Logic would dictate that this also means, it is damaging to your search.
Combine these two things, making bad decisions because you “think” you have more traffic, and your real search juice being simultaneously diminished.. and you can see a cascading “you are in trouble” impact on your digital marketing.
Now we have some new talk from Google about bots that bounce around different sites artificially increasing traffic and Google saying clearly, they are trying to figure out a way to penalize people that engage these bots. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous web marketers DELIBERATELY use these bots – it creates more click throughs – and you pay for those click throughs. That means that whoever is talking to you about Pay Per Click advertising, is making more money, charging you for more clicks than you are really getting. Somewhere around 30% of all paid for clicks are not real people – they are bots! Ghost Spam for profit! Google cannot discern those that are deliberately using spam to bilk advertisers or to present bogus traffic reports to their customers, from those that are just getting spammed. Meaning it’s very likely that yet another Search Juice Ding is about to hit you – you will be penalized for ghost spam coming to your site because it looks like you are trying to artificially increase your traffic. Here’s an interesting article in support of that supposition.
There is a subtle technical difference between Ghost Spam and Crawler Spam, and the type spam you get that increases traffic and click through for profit. Some Internet marketers point to an old video by Matt Cuts (2010) that states this type of spam has no impact – because it mostly impacts Google Analytics, wich is not what Google uses to evaluate the search worthiness of your site.
Now more recently, I am reading thise comment, October 2015 with clear indications from Google that this general type of spam will impact your rankings in the future.
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-penalize-sites-using-deceptive-mobile-traffic-networks-236743
My bet is, this is going to end up hurting in more ways than just Google Analytic misinformation.
So, for my clients, we are now starting to block known ghost spammers from your sites, and we will be creating filters in Google Analytics to eliminate the reporting of Ghost Spam.
This means that as we implement, you will see your overall traffic GO DOWN. We have some site with only 3 or 4 % ghost spam/referrers spam. I have some sites where that number is more like 75%. The traffic that is going away on your reports though was never “Real” traffic to begin with.
The spam traffic that we have identified so far, specific to the sites we manage are
ranksonic.net
adf.ly
copyrightclaims.org
traffic2cash.org
get-your-social-buttons.info
boost-my-site.com
snip.to
black-friday.ga
hosting-tracker.com
quit-smoking.ga
cyber-monday.ga
rusexy.xyz
lsex.xyz
santasgift.ml
boost-my-site.com
top1-seo-service.com
inboxdollars.com
weburlopener.com
alibestsale.com
hosting-tracker.com
dnsrsearch.com
anonymous-redirect.com
css-workinprogress.com
search.pch.com
boost-my-site.com
alert.scansafe.net
get.smarter.com
So, my clients, as we block all this spam traffic, your overall traffic numbers will decrease, however, what is happening is junk traffic, fake traffic, that is negatively impacting you, is being cut out, and you are simply getting a more accurate picture of the real traffic on your site.
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