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I don't think so...We had owned the domains for several years and the bad links have just come up in webmaster tools recently.

Hi Patrick Thanks for your response.  I have done a search and found that most of the pages that had these articles up run to a 404 error.  The original author owner of the content has offered them to me as she is part of my site.  But she wanted to give a heads up and say 5 of the articles she gave had already been published and previously taken down as the owner of that blog wanted to renew things... So before I posted I wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to harm my site and against googles rules.  Thanks for your in depth response Patrick, always great getting feedback from you! Thanks

Hi Patrick, Thanks for your response, all sites have sitemaps, I submitted all 3 domains below to through WMT https://www.zenory.com.au/sitemap_us.xml https://www.zenory.com/sitemap_au.xml https://www.zenory.com/sitemap_nz.xml so that they would not be overwriten all top level domains are on the same server.  After this I still have no idea why they are not showing up correctly.  I have limited all the cross referencing from each site to try and better defensiate each site so google could pick up that each one was relevant to the country specified.  For the au it says 74 were submitted and only 2 were indexed. Any advice around this would be awesome Thanks in advance

Hi Dirk, Sorry i only just picked up your message! Thanks again for your response! I will try adding what you have suggested, when you /folder_to_be_removed/ - can you explain what that means?

Hi seequs, to complement Cyrus answer, here is an explanation of Matt Cutts related to your question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU. And if you think about it, it wouldn't be fair since not everyone uses Google Analytics. About the spam harming your site, if we talk about ghost spam there is nothing to worry(except for your data of course) since there is not real interaction with the spam and any of your pages, it all happens in GA. On the other hand, Crawler Spam does access your site, and it uses your resources, although is nothing to be alarmed since visits from this type of spam are less frequent than ghosts. If you want to fully block crawlers you can do it by adding some lines to your .htaccess file, like this STOP REFERRER SPAM RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website.com [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F] It seems that the problem with the spam is not that simple. For what I understand they are preparing a guide. In the meantime, if you are not already using a filter based on valid hostnames, I recommend you to do it, one filter, and you will forget about the ghost spam. You can find more information about this solution here http://moz.com/community/q/seeing-massive-spikes-in-direct-traffic-with-100-bounce-rates?#reply_298133 Hope it helps,

Hi there You can include the release/creation date if it is relevant to the industry - something like SaaS or item models or something like that where features are added. I would highly recommend if you do include information like this (and even if you don't, really) to check out Schema that will help you markup important information about your products, possibly helping your search engine performance. If it's just one type of product that doesn't change often or hasn't in years, it's not really necessary to add dates or anything though. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Jarno I was going through the metrics for this site in OSE and Majestic, and it appears that this site is actually quite relevant for camping / recreation / outdoor backlinks in Majestic. It's seems it's doing a great job of associating itself with those themes. It also has a quite high Page Authority. I am assuming this is why this subdomain is ranking rather high. That being said, Moz is reporting some pretty spammy backlinks pointed at them. That being said, how long have they been out ranking you? Have you done a competitive analysis on them? Keep in mind, this could be a fluctuation in the SERPs as there was an update on May 3rd. I would wait it out and see what happens. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Thanks all for your help and advice , really appreciate that !

Awesome response Dirk! Thanks again for your endless help!

Or 301 redirect these pages to home page? This is something of a no-no. Google states that a 301 should be used to redirect one page to another that is similar. If you can't find a good match, you are better leaving it as a 404. I heard there's a Wordpress plugin that 301 redirects all the 404 errors successfully preserving all the potential link juice. As above, if you have a plugin do this for you then you could find that old URL's are redirected 'en-masse' to the same place, which will do you no favours. -Andy

I completely agree with Patrick. I can't reiterate enough, before you start blocking traffic make sure you do your research. For example semalt, a well known "spider" seems to send fake visits. Before you actually block anything, it might be worth just filtering analytics to get a true analytics of traffic. I try and view blocking/disavow as a last ditch effort. They will have the most drastic impact. Patrick included some great links, I highly suggest checking them out.

Hey Patrick, Thank you very much for your answer, it is very helpful.

Thank you both for your expertise!  Marie your article is a marvelous resource.  We will continue to dig into the GA but will also seriously consider pursuing the landing page suggestion with a nofollow link out.  Since we are rewriting content as well as redesigning, it seems that will produce the best chance to heal the site.

Hi Cocoonfxmedia, Thanks for sharing the websites. Yes, it appears you're dealing with a website that's walking a very fine line (arcimedia.co.uk) at the moment. One look at its backlink profile and you can see how over optimized the website's anchor text truly is. Unfortunately, this isn't uncommon, especially in the digital marketing/web design niche. This proves that Google's algorithm isn't perfect at identifying spammy backlink profiles. It may also be the case that their website has a few authoritative links point to it or another website that 301 redirects to it. The only real solution is to continue to fight the good fight. I wouldn't be surprised to see this website pop out of the search results at some point in the future due to an algo update or manual penalty. It's a hard pill to swallow, but I would continue to focus on your local SEO efforts (building quality citations, local links, engaging local content, acquiring reviews, etc). It isn't worth jeopardizing the long-term potential of a website, in my opinion, to receive short term rankings. Best of luck,

Hi there You should be fine as long as you don't have 30 locations with the same structure, but I would work on your cleaning up your URL over optimization - maybe have an Areas We Serve page with office location information in different cities. I would check out this local SEO resource from Moz and Service Area Business from Google. You should also look into Whitespark and Moz Local as these will help you in categorized local citations and listings, especially if you have different offices in different cities. As long as the content is different (not just changing the city names in the content) then it shouldn't be an issue, but I would work on your local SEO and condensing information where possible. Hope this helps! Good luck!

I'll certainly bring it up. Maybe we can use the general concept and agree on a page title that accomplishes the same goal without sacrificing brand consistency. Thanks again for the great suggestions.

I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months? Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern. I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.

Good Morning! I would suggest taking a look at the Moz post on On-page Ranking Factors, in particular roughly at the bottom of the page there is a portion titled "An Ideally Optimized Webpage" which is almost a TLDR of the entire article and in my opinion spells out the structure of a perfect internal linking scheme very well. I personally think it is natural that some of your pages may overlap what your homepage is optimized for. Obviously the more focused your homepage is, the better, but I try and make my homepage as specific as I can while still allowing me wiggle room to expand on the topic throughout the website. For some reason I always imagine the Taxonomy trees from my old Biology classes. On another note a lot of Homepages will integrate a blog feed so that their content is continuously changing. Google is smart, and is always learning. I personally think we are slowly moving away from the days of designing/writing FOR Google. I try and organize everything in a way that my dad would understand. If he can figure out what my website is about, or how to get around, Google can. (keep in mind with my previous statement, we still have to play by Googles rules and Best Practice for SEO, but just my own thoughts) Hope that helps a little!

Thanks Patrick for the reply,   Let me like to tell that each of both pages of our website rank once in listing for our main key search term. It happens to see  sometime 1st page rank(that is homepage) and sometime 2nd page rank(sub-page of website). But both pages don't rank together in the SERPs. Ranking both pages alternatively is not anything serious thing causing or splitting our main objective page to rank higher?? We are trying to figure out, what BEST SOLUTION we can have to implement in order to bring our any of web-page first-5 rank .. ?? Warm Regards, Aman