Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?

[19958]

Hi!

My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage.

I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance!

[DanielMulderNL]

Do suspicious domains show up in referring domains in the opensiteexplorer? Also if you connect the moz pro dash with Analytics it will start to pick up on landing pages receiving traffic. These would eventually show up as landing pages? But then they would somethimes need a keyword provided by Google. That could take a while.
And if not they must surely be logged on the webserver log files?

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.

You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.

Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.

Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.

Sincerely,

Mark

[KeriMorgret]

So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:

site:mysite.com badkeyword

and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.

[DanielMulderNL]

yes but that's to easy and where is the fun in it:-) But could also fast become a case of chasing ghosts and shadows it it originates from websites with millions of pages?

[KeriMorgret]

The OP stated that these are keywords drawing traffic to the site, not referral traffic. Therefore, people are typing these keywords into a search engine and finding the site directly via the keywords.

It could be that the search engines are seeing a hacked version of the site that visitors don't see. Look at the landing pages for these keywords, then fetch those pages as Googlebot from Google Webmaster Tools.

[LesleyPaone]

That was actually the first thing I did when I was going to answer, but I didn't feel educated enough to answer the question. The correlation I could find is there is a company that publishes a news paper by the same name (the other companies name is an exact match on their domain name) that has written articles about Myanmar, but I don't know if that would influence anything since they do not have links on the page. If so, this is an area of SEO I haven't explored before.

[DanielMulderNL]

dns and domain hijack? Mm... Then I would advice to hire a security expert. Not a SEO.

[mandr612]

If your using WordPress I believe there is a way to exclude keywords so your site doesn't show up for certain keywords.

[19958]

Thanks, Keri! I couldn't find anything via this method or good old fashioned search. It's a bit baffling that Analytics says it's coming from search when I can't find any results in search.

[19958]

Thanks Mark and Daniel! I'll give it a go in OSE. I've been sticking to Analytics and GWT but it seems like it's time to branch out.

[19958]

Thanks, Keri! I did a fetch and the code looks fine. Still searching...

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Can you give us the URL of the site in question to take a peek ourselves - I'm know rather curious about what is going on here

[19958]

This post is deleted!

[DanielMulderNL]

Does this query contain any site you might know?

Google serp

[19958]

Unfortunately, no. Thank you for investigating though!

[19958]

This post is deleted!

[DanielMulderNL]

I got nothing :D... sorry..

[DanielMulderNL]

Hate to quit but without any specifics it's not sensible to search more thorough and I would like to second the remark by Marks Ginsberg. But if you do I would love to take another look into it. Nothing like some could old investigating I always say.

[19958]

Thanks for all the advice and help! I'm still digging, but I noticed that our PPC ads are surfacing on pages that are on SERPs for those particular terms. It may be some kind of wonky Analytics tracking.