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Gonzalez347

: Can organic traffic be spoofed in Google Analytics the same way as 'Refer spam' Ive recently seen a large spike in organic traffic to a website in Google Analytics, to diagnose the spike ive

@Gonzalez347

Posted in: #GoogleAnalytics #GoogleAnalyticsSpam #GoogleSearchConsole

Ive recently seen a large spike in organic traffic to a website in Google Analytics, to diagnose the spike ive done / will do (will do becuase some of the data is not available yet) the following :


Review clicks and impressions in webmaster tools (will do)
Review weather forecast in moz weather (to check for algo changes) (have done, its a mild day by the looks of things (22/06/15))
Review google places clicks and impressions (will do)


While im waiting for further data from the sources above which are not 'live' i was wandering can organic traffic be spoofed in the same way as refer spam, and if so has any one seen it before as i couldnt see an obvious benefit for someone doing it, in the same way there is with refer spam.

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@Bryan171

Almost any dimension can be faked by the spammer. So far I've seen it as:


referrer (the most used)
pages (like guardlink)
events (event-tracking)
organic (darodar)
and even fake direct visits


*Some of them show in more than one dimension

Until now I've detected huge spikes on referrer, pages and fake direct visits, for organic I've seen only hits in small amounts. So probably what you have is not spam.

But to be sure add as a second dimension hostname if you see not set or a fake/weird hostname then is spam, like in the image I attached

To take care of all ghost spam no matter where it shows you can use a filter based on your hostnames. Here you can find more information about that:

stackoverflow.com/a/29717606/3197362 https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362


And here is the list of all keyword spam I've found

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