: Spam bot constantly hitting our site 800-1,000 times a day. Causing loss in sales For the past 5 months our site has been receiving hits from these 4 sites below; sheratonbd.com newsheraton.com

@Fox8124981

I've been trying to track this one down as well. Whatever they're doing, they seem to rotate domains every couple of weeks to a month. This can easily be seen in our analytics by filtering by traffic from Bangladesh (which we get very little legitimate traffic from.)

In our case, the traffic isn't affecting sales but is a couple of orders of magnitude more than the OP is seeing.

A bit of research turned up robotlancer.com/, which bills itself as "a software that helps Dolancer/ Skylancer/ Newsheraton/ Googleaddclick/ Visionaddworld/ Makegem subscribers to click their ads automatically." One of the screenshots shows a script that is loading and clicking on ads. From our analytics, it seems to use a random user agent and OS for each load which makes it look like human traffic.

This whole thing definitely smells like some sort of pay to click scam, but I can't figure out what they're doing since there's no way they could benefit from clicking on our ads!

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@Berumen354

You characterize this as a "spam bot" but the symptoms look to me more like human users clicking links to your site on one of the "sheraton" sites you list. Apparently you're getting repeated hits from each IP. Why would the human do this? Probably the site promotes the idea that the user can earn money by doing so (whether they actually earn money or not).

Why would a site like this link to your site? It might be a mistake, but consider if such a site has a bad reputation to search engines. Then your position on search result pages might be negatively affected, lowering your position of appearance and so your organic search hits. A reason a link-click site might link to you is to gain a payment for this effect from someone who wants it, e.g. a competitor.

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@Caterina187

Funny this should come up, I was dealing with a similar problem at work today! @HeatherWalters has covered most of the good stuff, but there are a couple of things to add.

You can block referers by domain using the following htaccess code:-

RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spammer-one.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spammer-two.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spammer-three.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]


This redirects them to a 403 forbidden response, which I'm guessing is the most efficient way of dealing with the problem in terms of server load as its a fairly small header.

There are some interesting ideas floating around about keyword blocking via httpd or using mod_security, which might be worth investigating.


@LazyOne 's response to my question about the most efficient
way to do this indicates that httpd.conf would be a better option
than .htaccess as it would be loaded prior to mod_rewrite (I will
post code once I've had the time to test this).


Anecdotally it is causing problems in SERPs ranking, I've only seen two sites with a problem as serious as yours and both reported loss of organic search traffic, but I haven't found similar reports online or anything from Google that supports this notion.


@DisgruntledGoat indicates in his comment below that Bounce Rate in
Google Analytics would not cause a loss of SERPs on it's own. But posting referrer logs
might, as it would result in links to spam sites from your domain.


You can filter out the spam results from your analytics report, BusinessHut has a good tutorial which suggests using multiple versions of the following filter:-

Filter Type: Custom > EXCLUDE

Filter Field: Campaign Source Filter

Pattern: golbnet

Case Sensitive: No



This will eliminate any referrer with the text “golbnet” anywhere in
the referring URL. To exclude other referrers, such as forexmarket,
you could create another filter, OR you could simply add a “pipe”
which acts as an “OR” operator. (eg. Filter Pattern:
golbnet|forexmarket|anythingelse )
*You can get the pipe by pressing Shift and Backspace.


He also notes, as @Heather does that you should always maintain an unfiltered profile.

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@Welton855

Have you considered the possibility that they are visiting your site, hoping you will research who they are, by following the link (so that you end up visiting their spammy sites.........the blackest of blackhat SEO)? Have you accessed this information on website hits purely through GA or have you looked at your website's traffic logs? Maybe they aren't visiting your site at all but plugging into your google analytics account and injecting their own 'hits' with special spamming software, in the hopes that you will take a look at their links (and the side effect is that all the skyrocketeing bounce rate is affecting your search engine ranking and therefore your real traffic). Please take a look at this link: google analytics referrer spam and be sure to read through the comments section.

You can filter the results of these out of your analytics reports by creating a duplicate profile and then adding a filter to it but I am unsure as to whether google still 'sees' them as hits. Supposedly, referrer spam doesn't affect SEO but I personally doubt that, if it is causing your bounce rate to go through the roof.

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