Questionable Referral Traffic

[kylehungate]

Hey SEOMozers,

I'm working with a client that has a suspicious traffic pattern going on. In October, a referral domain called profitclicking.com started passing visits to the site. Almost, in parallel the overall visits decreased anywhere from 35 to 50%.

After checking out profitclicking.com more, it promises more traffic "with no SEO knowledge". The client doesn't think that this service was signed up for internally. Regardless, it obviously smells pretty fishy, and I'm searching for a way I can disallow traffic from this site.

Could I simply just write a simple disallow statement in the robots.txt and be done with it? Just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas before recommending a solution.

Thanks!

[chris.kent]

Looks sketchy at best. This may be one of the rare occasions when it's appropriate to use Google's disavow tool. However, before you do that I would reach out to the people at profit clicking and see what the deal is, and if you can get your site removed.

[MoosaHemani]

Kyle, you are going through a bit better situation then I was previous year... actually someone either from our team mistakenly did that or some competitor did this awesome work for us but we were receiving at most 40% of our total traffic from some similar kind of website and it was a pretty fishy pattern.

1. I would advise you to be very transparent to the client and tell them this is not you or else when after few month this traffic level will decrease it will be way too much difficult to handle client.
2. If the traffic is of good percentage and give you the bounce rate of 90+ % then you should somehow contact the company to stop this.

In my case I was helpless as there was no way the website people were replying me... so I was helpless, I wait for it and it goes automatically after few months... but it was very difficult to justify this on a business level.

I would love to hear from other people if they know how to block that traffic... because it’s difficult to block by blocking the IPs as there is no defined pattern of it (at least in my case).

[EEE3]

I haven't tried this method out, but it might be what you're looking for http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/

If not there, check out http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/analytics - There might be an easier solution there.

Good luck!

[hbs200]

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