Category: Google Analytics

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What the scourge of referrer spam means to you

Referrer spam must be stopped

For a long time it was true that the more traffic that your website got the better.  No more.  Not exactly. Coders have been spoofing Google Analytics accounts to make it appear that visits are coming from what seems to be a never-ending list of websites. These “visits” are fake. No one is visiting your site from these “sites”. These fake visits provide no benefit to you. We’ve seen statistics in which the fake visits outnumber legitimate ones by a factor of ten to one. This type of activity is known as “referrer spam”. It is done by malicious hackers to game the link-counting algorithms that search engines use to create rankings.

What’s the harm is this?

It wouldn’t be called “spam” if it were something that you wanted. Just like with email spam there are a number of costs that you will likely pay for these fake visits:

  • Your site may run slower
  • Google may lower your search rankings
  • It is possible that some of this traffic represents probes for WordPress vulnerabilities
  • It is a complete waste of your time

While there are a number of techniques to mitigate the effect of referrer spam none of them is a complete solution. Like so many threats to the security of your website, keeping referrer spam under control requires monitoring and an advanced understanding of Google Analytics and the underlying structure of your website.

It might be helpful for you to think of maintaining the “health” of your website. There are a number of components to this:

  • A technically contemporary and secure website platform
  • Fresh, relevant content
  • Active (not dead) links to and from well-regarded sites (not referrer spam) that are pertinent to your business
  • A workable social media presence

Google has a short article about the importance of the above items called “Steps to a Google-friendly site”. The SEO practices followed by sem[c] have always conformed to the guidelines set by Google. Contact us if you have any questions about your website and how it’s looking in Search. We can help you make your website healthier.

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Where is your website traffic coming from?

Recently a client asked me what was the cause in a large spike of traffic to his website. By looking into his Google Analytic stats I saw that there was one day on which search traffic for the name of his company jumped.  This is an example of validation, a key component of the current buying cycle. His products had been featured on an HGTV cable show. People watching the show wanted to know more and both searched and typed in the address for his website.

Your website stats can tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not working effectively for your website.  It can even help you with conventional media exposure like TV or print.  For a recent print example: we had a client who wanted to run print ads in magazines that had good and relevant content to his product. We created landing pages specifically for each magazine so that it would be easy to see which media buy was the best. This is SOP in online marketing because it is so effective in giving valuable information about your print campaigns.

“Best” from a marketing standpoint means increased traffic to the website. It is important to understand that sales will come from that increased traffic but the ratio of visits to sales will vary depending on media, time of year and many other variable specific to the product or service that is being sold.

We believe that Google Analytics gives you the best look at what’s happening with your website and install it on all of our clients’ sites. For more information search or click, you’ll find us.

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Are you benefitting from the increase in mobile traffic?

We are seeing an ever-increasing amount of traffic to the websites that we monitor from iPhones, Droids, and Blackberries, and predict that there will be an increase in Windows 7 Mobile access.
We have also seen websites from clients, prospective clients,  and competitors that really don’t show up on mobile at all.  For example, it is very common that a website’s graphic designer will incorporate a Flash front page. We have seen that even if the page detects that Flash isn’t available, it will suggest that the visitor install Flash. If the visitor is using Mac’s mobile operating system iOS on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, it is impossible for them to install Flash, even though iOS is the most frequently-used mobile operating device that we are seeing in the statistics. This failure to properly configure the website will ensure that those visitors using mobile handset devices are much less likely to return.Both Google and Bing are aggressively wooing users of their competitor’s operating system and both are very present on iOS. Bing apps are being heavily promoted on iOS and Android. Google is built into Android OS and is the default search engine in iOS. Google just announced the capability on Windows 7 Mobile to replace the default search engine Bing.

Google also just announced big changes in the way that it displays search results for mobiles. Their mobile blog reports that they have:

 

“expanded the story space to make tapping on articles easier and more accurate. Tapping anywhere on an article headline or snippet opens it up, and clicking on a section heading opens up that topic section on your screen.

 

In addition, the default view of stories is now collapsed in order  to reduce scrolling time. You can ‘expand’ a story by tapping ‘More sources’, which brings you to related stories from other sources.”

 

In other words, it’s quicker and more convenient.

 

As the use of mobiles to access the web increases, your website’s ability to accomplish your business goals will need to work really well on handsets.

Feel free to contact us about any aspect of mobile marketing or SEM/SEO.