Strange keyword showing in GA

[Alick300]

Hi All,

Since last two days I am seeing a very strange keyword appearing in Google Analytics. Why such keyword appearing in GA? any idea?

Please see keyword in attachment.

Thanks

ay6hH6z

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, the language seems Thai to, how do I know it? I am a Castle fan and just watched the recent episode of it J

Anyways, the reason why it is appearing is because someone is searching for these keywords and your website is appearing in the search results at his end. This could be a bot, a machine or may be a real human.

If the search number is one or few, you don’t really have to worry about it but if its in a decent amount like 10 or so in that case you should take preventive measure like check your security, as someone can try to hack your website or some other issues.

Why your website is appearing? Again many reasons, the kind of links pointing back to your website, one or few of them could be shady, the content you just shared went a lil more viral in other part of the world or several other reasons.

My idea is to do a bit more research about where this traffic is coming from, how often and what is the amount of traffic that you are receiving, how much time a people spend on the website when enter using this keyword and more.

Hope this helps!

[DirkC]

Hi

it's an attempt to combine analytics spam & being funny. In each case you're not the only one - see this discussion posted yesterday : http://moz.com/community/q/analytics-spammer-can-haz-humors-who-else (the image is a bit better - the words are not in a foreign language, but are funny faces made in symbols)

rgds

Dirk

[N1ghteyes]

Got to love that referal spam!

I've not seen this one yet in my reports, kind of disappointing really :(.

[Giovatto]

Referral spam is getting out of control lately for all my clients' sites. I really hope Google can do something about it soon.

[Alick300]

Hi All,

Today I got same error for my other website as well. I don't know how to stop this.

Thanks

[DirkC]

Hi Alick,

You might find this article useful: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data - the two options that are listed is blocking bot traffic using htaccess - or filter them in Analytics. If you check the link I gave you in my first answer - there are also some useful resources listed. Other resources can be found here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-analytics-referral-spam (and off course - just google "referral spam" - it's quite a popular subject)

Hope this helps

Dirk

[Travis_Bailey]

It was kind of humorous, at first. It's now showing as returning organic traffic. Direct link to screencap from the original post:

1WnZK0p.png