Posted by jaredgardner

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

A few months back, my agency started seeing a referral traffic spike in our Google Analytics account. At first, I got excited. Someone is linking to us and people are clicking. Hooray!

Wrong! How very, very wrong. As I dug deeper, I saw that most of this referral traffic was sent from spammers, and mostly from one spammer named Vitaly Popov (or, as I like to call him, “the most recent pain in my ass”). 

The domains he owns have been giving our company’s site and most of our clients’ sites a few hundred sessions per month, enough to throw off the analytics data in many cases.

His sites aren’t the only ones I’ll cover in this how-to, but his spam network has been the biggest nuisance lately. If you’re getting spam referrers in your analytics, you should be able to follow the same steps to stop these data-skewing nimcompoops from spoiling your data, too.

Why do I need to worry about blocking and filtering these sites?

There are two main reasons I’m motivated to block these on all sites that I work with. First: corrupt analytics data. A few hundred hits a month on a site like Moz.com isn’t going to move the needle when compared to the sheer volume of sessions they have daily. However, on a small site for a local plumber, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic and making marketing analysis a frustrating endeavor.

Second: server load and security. I didn’t ask them to crawl or visit my site. Their visits are using my server resources for something that I don’t want or need. An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. On top of that, who knows what else they’re doing on my site while they’re there. They could easily be looking for WordPress, plugin and server vulnerabilities.

Popular referral spam domains

Using  WHOIS.net, I found that Mr. Popov’s spam network includes these domains:

• darodar.com (and various subdomains)
• econom.co
• ilovevitaly.co (and other TLD variations)

Other spammers plaguing the web include:

• semalt.com (and various subdomains)
• buttons-for-website.com
• see-your-website-here.com

Many other sites have come and gone. These are just the sites that have been active lately.

Why are they hitting my site?

Why are people going through so much effort to crawl the web without blocking themselves from analytics? Spam! So much spam, it still blows me away. I looked into a few of the sites listed above. Three of the most prolific ones are doing it for very different reasons. 

See-your-website-here.com

This site takes the cake for being the most frustrating. This site is using referrer spam as a form of lead generation. What is their product you ask? Web spam. You can pay see-your-website-here.com to perform web spam for your company as a form of lead generation. The owner of this domain was kind enough to make his WHOIS information public. His name is Ben Sykes and he’s from London.

Semalt.com

Semalt.com and I have had a tumultuous relationship at best. Semalt is an SEO product that’s designed to give on- and off-page analysis such as keyword usage and link metrics. Their products seem to be somewhat legit. However, their business practices are not. Semalt uses a bot to crawl the web and index webpage data, but they don’t disable analytics tracking like most respectable bots do. They have a form to remove your site from being crawled at http://semalt.com/project_crawler.php, which is ever so nice of them. Of course, I tried this months ago and they still crawled our site. I ended up talking with a representative from Semalt.com via Twitter after I wrote this article: How to Stop Semalt.com from Plaguing Your Google Analytics Data. I’ve documented our interactions and the outcome of that project in the article. 

Darodar.com, econom.co, and ilovevitaly.com

This network appears to exist for the purpose of directing affiliate traffic to shopping sites such as AliExpress.com and eBay.com. I am guessing that the site won’t pay out to the affiliate unless the traffic results in a purchase, which seems unlikely. The sub-domain shopping.ilovevitaly.com used to redirect to aliexpress.com directly, but now it goes to a landing page that links to a variety of online retailers.

How to stop spam bots

Block via .htaccess

The best way to block referrers from accessing your site at all is to block them in your .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain. You can copy and paste the following code into your .htaccess file, assuming you’re on an Apache server. I like this method better than just blocking the domain in analytics because it prevents spam bots from hitting your server altogether. If you want to get creative, you can redirect the traffic back to their site.

# Block Russian Referrer Spam
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly.\.ru/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.org/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*ilovevitaly\.info/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*iloveitaly\.ru/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*econom\.co/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*savetubevideo\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*kambasoft\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*buttons\-for\-website\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*semalt\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*darodar\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F,L]

Warning: .htaccess is a very powerful file that dictates how your server behaves. If you upload an .htaccess file with one character out of place, you will likely take down the whole site. Before you make any changes to the file, I would suggest making a backup. If you don’t feel comfortable making these edits, see the WordPress plug-in option below.

Analytics filters

By itself, .htaccess won’t solve all of your problems. It will only protect you from future sessions, and it won’t affect the sessions that have already happened. I like to set up filters by country in analytics to remove the historical data, as well as to help filter out any other bots we might find from select countries in the future. Of course this wouldn’t be a good idea if you expect to get legitimate traffic from countries like Russia, Brazil, or Indonesia, but many U.S.-based companies can safely block these countries without losing potential customers. Follow the steps below to set up the filters.

First, click on the “Admin” tab at the top of the page. On the view column you will want to create a “new” view so that you still have an unadulterated report of all traffic in Google Analytics. I named my mine “Filter Bots.” After you have your new view selected, click in to the “Filters” section then select the “+New Filter Button.”

Setting up filters is pretty simple if you know what setting to use. I like to filter out all traffic from Russia, Brazil, and Indonesia. These are just the countries that have been giving us issues lately. You can add more filters as you need them.

The filter name is just an arbitrary label. I usually just type “block [insert country here].” Next, choose the filter type “custom.” Choose “country” from the “Filter Field” drop down. The “Filter Pattern Field” is where you actually define what countries you are filtering, so make sure you spell them correctly. You can double check your filters by using the “Verify This Filter” button. A graph will pop-up and show you how many sessions will be removed from the last seven days.

I would recommend selecting the “Bot Filtering” check box that is found in “View Settings” within the “Admin” tab. I haven’t seen a change in my data using this feature yet, but it doesn’t hurt to set it up since it’s really easy and maybe Google will decide to block some of these spammers.

Using WordPress? Don’t want to edit your .htaccess file?

I’ve used the plugin Wp-Ban before, and it makes it easy to block unwanted visitors. Wp-ban gives you the ability to ban users by IP, IP range, host name, user agent and referrer URL from visiting your WordPress blog all from within the WordPress admin panel. This a great option for people who don’t want to edit their .htaccess file or don’t feel comfortable doing so.

Additional resources

There are a few other great posts you can refer to if you’re looking for more info on dealing with referrer spam:

1. http://www.optimizesmart.com/geek-guide-removing-referrer-spam-google-analytics/
2. https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam
3. http://blog.raventools.com/stop-referrer-spam/
4. http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/12/removing-referral-spam-google-analytics/

Conclusion

I hope this helps you block all the pesky spammers out there. There are definitely different ways you can solve this problem, and these are just the ones that have helped me protect analytics data. I’d love to hear how you have dealt with spam bots. Share your stories with me on Twitter or in the comments below.

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Posted by randfish

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of a new feature inside  Open Site Explorer—In-App Social & Contact Data. 

With this launch, you’ll be able to see the social or email accounts we’ve discovered associated with a given website, and have one-click access to those pages.

Initially, the feature offers:

1. Availability today on the inbound links tab and in Link Intersect on the “pages -> subdomains” view. In the future, if y’all find it useful, we hope to expand its presence to other areas of the tool as well.
2. Email accounts will only be shown if they match the domain name (e.g. rand@moz.com would be shown next to moz.com, randfishkin@yahoo.com would not) and if they appear in standard format on the page (we don’t try to grab emails in JavaScript or that use alternate formats to obsfucate).
3. We show Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and email addresses we’ve found on multiple pages of the site (we take a small random set and analyze whether these social/contact data pieces are uniform). If we find multiple accounts, you’ll see this:

Use cases

There are three major use cases for this feature (at least for me; you might have more!):

1) Link/Outreach prospecting

It can be a pain to visit sites, find social accounts/emails, and copy them into a spreadsheet or send messages (and recall which ones you have/haven’t done yet). By including social/contact data in the same interface where you’re doing link analysis, we hope to save you time and clicks.

2) Link/site trust and audience reach analysis

We’re actually using this data on the back end at Moz for our upcoming Spam Score feature (coming very soon), but you can use it manually to help with a quick mental filter for trustworthy/authoritative/non-spammy sites, and to get a sense for the size and reach of a site’s social audience.

3) At-a-glance analysis of social networks among a group

If you’re in a given space (e.g. travel blogs), it’s a process to determine which social networks are/aren’t being used by industry participants and influencers. Social/contact data in OSE can help with that by showing which social networks various sites are using and linking to from their pages:

We need your feedback

This first implementation is relatively light in the app—we haven’t yet placed this data anywhere/everywhere it might be useful. Before we do, we want to hear what you think: Is this useful and valuable to your work? Does it help save you time? Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you? Please let us know in the comments, and by getting back in touch with us after you’ve had a chance to try it out for yourself.

Thanks for giving social/contact data a spin, and look for more upgrades to Open Site Explorer in the very near future!

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

You and your readers are being bombarded with information. Too often that’s in the shape of long-winded emails, blog posts, and reports that say very little or assume that because digital space is (virtually) free and unlimited, so is your time. 

But time and attention are valuable. If you learn to practice concision in all your writing (from emails and reports to blog posts, whitepapers, and product copy), you’ll not only get your point across, you might also earn your readers’ trust, gratitude, and repeat traffic. Plus, concise copy converts better.

Quick advice on writing concisely

The best advice I ever received about writing concisely came from former newspaperman (and current Moz associate) Ronell Smith. He said that in order to clearly get your point across in the fewest possible words it’s essential to:

• Write a one-sentence description of the post you wish to write (this is basically the headline)
• Think of the number one thing you’d like readers to take away from the post
• Highlight at least three facts (authoritative, supportive evidence) that support this main point
• Jot down notes that help you tell the story using these facts
• Spend a few days letting the elements “breathe”

Now if I were writing the most concise blog post ever, I’d stop right there, because Ronell already said the most important things. But sometimes it’s helpful to see how someone else puts advice into action. So here’s how I’m putting Ronell’s advice to work to write a post about concision.

Write a one-sentence description of the post

Learning how to make your point in as few words as possible will help you capture your audience’s attention.

I could (and should) stop there. But I want to make a couple of points about why this is important:

• Your brain does a lot of work as it’s trying to condense that amazing idea in your head down into one sentence—as much work as creating a whole first draft.
• Once you have a one-sentence description of where you’re going, it’s easy to toss aside all those other exciting ideas that try to plant themselves on the page and focus on what you wanted to say in the first place.

Think of the number one thing you’d like readers to take away from the post

Fewer words often makes for clearer, more impactful communication. Once I know exactly what it is that I want you to take away from this post, I can make a promise that everything will contribute to that number one goal. This is good because:

• It helps you focus on one audience. When you’re writing amazing tips on keyword research, it can be really easy to want to also remind readers why keyword research is important. That’s the moment when you lose the interest of people who get the whys of keyword research. They are now bored and done with you (even though you were just about to blow their minds with really revolutionary information).
• You know what to lead with. Even if you’re writing a crucial email, you can bet not everyone will read every word (or paragraph). By leading with the most important part, your message is more likely to be understood.

Highlight at least three facts that support this main point

Technically, I’ve been cheating so far and adding in facts along the way. This step will help you:

• Build an outline of what you want to say. It’s easier to write to outlines and you’ll be sure to include all the points you wanted to see.
• Preview the quality of your argument. If you’re writing an article about how content is king and your first fact is “because everyone says so” and the second is “readers share stuff” and you’re struggling for a third fact, go back and find a stronger argument.
• Stay on topic.

Jot down notes that help you tell the story using those three facts

Hooray! You finally get to elaborate. I’ll start my elaboration by telling you that I’ve deleted about 500 words from this post already just because I was thinking so hard about concision. Do I miss a little of my standard whimsy and storytelling style? Yes (although I’m making up for it in this paragraph).

Because you’ve already honed in tight on your subject, you can let your creative self a little loose now. Enjoy embellishing your evidence with relevant examples and case studies. Relish the chance to make your points more memorable and engage your audience by sharing pertinent stories.

Spend a few days letting the elements “breathe”

Once you’ve pulled together your main point with supporting facts and illustrated those with stories, you need to step away from your writing. If you’re writing an email, you might not have a few days, but at least go to lunch or grab a coffee. Giving your writing room to breathe allows you to:

• Spot gaps. Everything makes perfect sense in your head, but a breath of fresh air might help you see where you forgot to actually write down a crucial piece of your argument.
• See redundancies. Sometimes you’re so passionate about something you say it twice (although usually in slightly different ways). A second, later read can show you where you’re repeating yourself.
• Be rational. Speaking of passion, sometimes we write things we’d never actually want to see out in the world. Allowing your writing to rest can help you make your point without saying anything you wouldn’t want repeated. This makes you easier to listen to as well.

The rest of the story

Now that we’ve seen Ronell’s points in action, there are a few more things I want to add.

Concision usually happens in editing

If you’ve been following Ronell’s advice, your writing is going to be a lot clearer, shorter, and more impactful. But don’t count on your first draft to be the best draft. You can usually clean up a lot of extra words (and random errors) with a second draft.

Why concision?

You’re busy. Your boss is busy. Your reader is busy. We’re all reading less and less of the information presented to us. But reading is still a critical way that we share information. By learning to say more with fewer words, you’ll get your point across and come out on top. 

Concision ain’t easy

In fact, you might spend more time crafting your message. Making your point makes that time and effort worth the extra work. Take the Moz Top 10 for example: over the last six editions, the ones with the fewest number of words have had the highest click-through rates.

Shortening the Moz Top 10 often takes me an extra draft, but that kind of increase in CTR is worth one more pass.

How this works at Moz

I was shocked when Trevor and I found that the most popular Moz blog posts (usually) come in at 1,200-1,800 words. That seemed long to me (especially for the Internet), but then I realized how much advice and education are usually packed into one post.

Compare that with what we sometimes see in YouMoz, which are initial drafts of 4,000-8,000 words. I am certain that a few of those authors have that much valuable information to share about one topic. But my guess is that most of those articles are trying to do too much in one post or are repeating themselves unnecessarily. I’d also be really surprised if most readers manage to reach the end of a post that long. That’s the real tragedy of overly wordy writing: No matter how brilliant you are, unless you are the most engaging writer ever, no one is reading what you’re writing. And according to one study, visitors only read 18% of content beyond the 1,250 word mark.

Do you have tips for stripping the bloat from your writing? Or do you truly love (and actually read) long-form writing on the web? Write me a novel in the comments ☺

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Posted by Ben.AustinThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc. For too … Continue reading →

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