Apparent Bot Queries and Impressions in Webmaster Tools

[SameerBhatia]

I've been noticing some strange stats in Google Webmaster Tools for my forum, which has been getting spam queries with impressions and no clicks.

See the queries in the attached images. This might be a motive for the spammers or scrapers.

I set the date range to just 22 Aug - 22 Nov and I see very obviously the spike is due to impressions.

Questions:

What should/can I do?

Is Google doing something about this?

How to avoid this?

o6gKB

[Ria_]

This is becoming disgustingly common.

The only thing I can suggest though is to Filter Queries Not Containing "privacy: your email address will not be shared" (or whatever) to get all those search queries removed temporarily from your Search Analytics. But it's a nuisance to have to do it every time...

As for preventing it in the first place, I'm not sure what you can do. The spam isn't targeting your website, it's targeting a search query. I don't know what you could do really to prevent being indexed for a particular search query.... What's your average position for these weird queries anyway?

Really interested to see if anyone can provide an actual solution to this.

[MattRoney]

This is definitely a frustrating issue. We ran a couple blog posts this year that may be able to help:

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

[Ria_]

All well and good for Analytics data, but OP is referring to Webmaster Tools spam.

Any blog posts or solutions on Webmaster Tools / Search Console spam in Search Analytics?

[MattRoney]

Ah, my mistake. I'll ask around on our content team and see if they haven anything.