Organic Traffic from irrelevant keywords in GA?

[SorinaDascalu]

Irving,

I personally saw this happen on a website - it was hacked, but no malware was placed on it. So the browser message  "this website may harm your computer" was not showing up, and no massage was displayed in WMT under Malware.

These are some blackhat SEO hacks, where they alter the content of a website and place links to porn/gambling without the intention to get the website flagged for malware. The hackers just want to get good links to their shallow websites, not to knock these websites out of Google.

[PFX111]

Hi Sorina,

Thanks for your response. I did check the keywords in Google Webmaster Tools under Optimization---->Content Keywords, but i could not find any such term, which was appearing in Google Analytics. Also, i did review 200 URLs and still could not find anything related to those keywords on my website. The browser message  "this website may harm your computer" is also not showing up in search results. These searches are coming from a particular city only. What should i do now to overcome this issue?

[Everett]

PFX111,

Please provide the domain if you could. This will make it much easier for us to help you.

I seriously doubt this is a result of someone doing "negative SEO" but could not say for sure unless I can look at it myself. One thing I'd like to know is the landing page URL where these terms are sending visitors on your site from the SERPs.

[PFX111]

Hi,

The domain name and the landing page is http://www.apollotyres.com/india/. I have attached few screenshots of the GA account highlighting the irrelevant keywords driving organic traffic to the website. Kindly have a look at it and suggest a solution to overcome this issue.

wtlA8yr,zYn8n55,c5emIW7#0 wtlA8yr,zYn8n55,c5emIW7#1 wtlA8yr,zYn8n55,c5emIW7#2

[Everett]

Hello PFX111,

I checked the source code of the page, as well as the text-only version, and source code of the cached page in Google/Bing/Yahoo serps. I did not see any questionable content. If they are hacking and cloaking they're doing a darn good job of it, but I don't think that's it. Like everyone else, my first reaction was to say you were hacked, but the site appears in the SERPs without any message from Google about it being harmful to your computer, and I see no evidence that this spammy content appears on the page even when Google views the site.

Here are my two thoughts at this point:

1. It could be referral spam.

2. Someone else could be using your Google Analytics account code (it looks like UA-######-#) on their site.

In both cases you would see the keywords in Google Analytics but not Google Webmaster Tools. You can set up a new profile in Google Analtics and set it to track the domain (instead of just the relative path), which could bring up other domains if they are using your Analytics code. See this page for details on how to do that:

http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012243?hl=en

[MikeTek]

If I'm not mistaken, I believe you can simply select the "secondary variable" option in the organic search report and enter "Hostname" as the variable - which will display the root of the relative page URL for each keyword, uncovering what domain that traffic is hitting. I've used this in the past for similar GA profile issues across root/sub domains. Might be worth a shot.

[KaneJamison]

http://reverseinternet.com/analytics/5670334 is showing that GA code being used on 4 domains. 2 have apollo in the name and redirect to the main site. A random 4th one called deltapoint24.com doesn't appear to have the GA code on the homepage, and throws a 404 when you add /india/ to the url.

I would also check the hostname as Mike suggested.

[PFX111]

Hi Mike,

I selected the "secondary variable" option in the organic search report and enter "Hostname" as the variable in Google Analytics account. However, it is displaying my website's URL only for all relevant as well as irrelevant keywords.

[MikeTek]

I see - I believe the hostname can be overridden by using the setDomainName function in the GA snippet, so that may be what's going on. WHY someone would go through the trouble, I don't know.

I would suggest posting this issue in the Google Products forum on Google Analytics, where you may be able to get some attention from someone inside Google who may have seen this problem before and have suggestions on how to handle it.

I highly doubt this is hurting your search engine rankings in any way - none of the offending content is in place on your website. It is much more likely that this is the result of someone scraping/republishing your site content and grabbing your GA code with it.

[PFX111]

I did a deep dive analysis of this organic traffic from irrelevant keywords again and came to a conclusion that it is coming from a particular Internet Service Provider(ISP) and that too from a particular location only. In-order to explore more in detail, i monitor real time data in Google Analytics for organic traffic in that particular location and i found the same (screenshot attached). As a preventive measure, i have implemented a filter in the GA profile by excluding searches from that Internet Service Provider in GA reports. But this does not seems to be a permanent solution to this issue.

Can anyone suggest a solution  to fix this issue permanently?

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