Nuisance visitors to non active page. What's going on?

[Lysarden]

Hi Guys, for the past several months, I get high volume of searches on a non-existing page /h/9249823.html. These searches come from all over the world from different domains and have a zero session duration. They are automatically forwarded to my home page. The source re Google Analytics is 12-reasons-for-seo.com. The full referrer is 12.reasons-for-seo.com/seo2php. Any idea what is provoking this activity? Any chance it's screwing with my legitimate search results or rankings?

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi there, so just to confirm - you have a page that is redirected to your homepage (I'm assuming not with a JavaScript redirect) and your Google Analytics is reporting that page is getting traffic from 12-reasons-for-seo.com?

This sounds like Measurement Protocol spam, I'll explain why I think that based on the way GA works but to reassure you - if that's the case then all it's messing with is your analytics. Google doesn't use Google Analytics data to inform search rankings - in terms of "bounces" Google just uses data about whether a searcher, on a Google page, clicks one result and then comes back to the search results page and clicks on another.

• Google Analytics records page views based on receiving a message from some JavaScript code that runs on (ideally) every page of your website
• If the page is redirected before it loads (as in not a JavaScript redirect) that code won't have time to run, so Google Analytics won't see you having a page view on that page, even if someone tried to access it
• Measurement Protocol is a way you can manually send hits to Google, it's a way of recording all kind of things that are difficult to reflect in terms of pageviews and events on your site (i.e. someone bought a product over the phone or someone viewed the same page on your app)
• Anyone can get your GA ID by looking at your page code and once they have that, they can send fake pageviews to your Google Analytics.

If it's true that all of these pageviews are landing on a page that doesn't even load before it's redirected (that's important, because if it's a JavaScript redirect your GA code might have time to run) then the best solution for this is probably to find what all of these hits have in common (sounds like you've already found a couple things) then create a Google Analytics filter for your reporting view which excludes this traffic as specifically as possible (to reduce risk of accidentally dropping real traffic)