Referrers and Black Hat SEO
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Black Hat SEO consultants are attacking my blog because a negative, but true, article is appearing very high in search results for their client. They have created hundreds of spammy back-links which I have since disavowed. All the spammy links were to this one negative article and they were hoping that Goggle would penalize my article.
Now, they are creating hundreds of referrals per day, all to the same article, one view per visitor. The referrals are actual page views and not Google analytics exploits. I tested them being real by making the article private and the stats plummeted. Made it public again, and the counts jumped up again.
The Referrer sites seem to be hijacked and spammy, but I can’t list them here because WordPress no longer displays them when I marked them as spam. I can find nothing on the web about how this referrer spam might hurt my blog or help them with their Black Hat agenda. Any ideas or recommendations?The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Those visits shouldn’t affect your page ranking, as traffic is not really something that search engines consider when determining that. But that’s also keeping in mind that Google and other search engines adjust their algorithms daily, so something that’s a big deal today might not be tomorrow, and vice versa.
But for the most part, the worst this will do is mess up your site stats, as it will be showing views from visitors who didn’t really read your post. There’s not much we can do about that, as it’s not possible to block anyone from viewing a public blog. Marking the referrals as spam and disavowing the spammy backlinks in Google’s Search Console are really all that you can do.
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Thank you for your answer which is reassuring. My concern is why an SEO consultant would waste his time on something that has zero chance of affecting page rank. I do monitor the page rank in Google Search Console and there has been no recent change for this article under attack. I’ll be back for advice if I discover that this SEO guy knows something that we don’t.
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My concern is why an SEO consultant would waste his time on something that has zero chance of affecting page rank.
Initially they tried that with the spammy backlinks, but you countered that. Now (and this is only a theory) it appears they’re just trying to wind you up.
You might try contacting/reporting this to Google directly, though I don’t know if they’ll be able to do anything.
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About contacting Google, the traffic does not show on my console so Google might already filter this spammy traffic. In any case, I can’t report it without the referrer’s URLs which are hidden by WordPress since I marked them as spam
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Hi @flashlightonroaches, alright. I would honestly just ignore them at this point.
SEO “tricks” are just that. Once search engines catch onto the bad behavior, they’ll take care of it. It looks like Google has already done that.
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