Hot answers tagged

10 votes

Block social-buttons.com / simple-share-buttons.com Referral Spam

They use a vulnerability in Google Analytics to make fake visits so the only way to stop them for now, and until Google fix it, is to make a filter in GA since that is the source of the problem. ...
  • 346
9 votes
Accepted

Does it really help against spam to replace the "@" with "(at)" and similar practices?

Yes, different email obfuscation methods do work with varying degrees of success. But each has to be weighed with whether they affect the ability for your customers to communicate easily with you. I ...
  • 1,069
8 votes
Accepted

How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?

The Spam is getting out of control. The list it's growing and it's time-consuming and not even efficient to add a filter for each of the spammers since most of them shows up for a few days and then ...
8 votes
Accepted

What is the purpose of spam registration bots?

The bot is looking for a site that automatically publishes their comments, using a "Black-List" method. Most Webmasters use the "White-List" method and only approve comments they have personally read. ...
8 votes

How to get whitelisted in microsoft's email network?

We did two things: Sign up with JMRP via https://postmaster.live.com/snds/JMRP.aspx Sign up with SNDS via http://postmaster.live.com/snds The JMRP application will go through a form and a document ...
8 votes

How to get whitelisted in microsoft's email network?

The deep link to get whitelisted for Microsoft's email network is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866&clcid This gives you the form "Sender Information for Outlook.com Delivery"
6 votes
Accepted

why does google request apple-app-site-association from every domain on the server?

If you look at https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/AppSearch/UniversalLinks.html it seems that the URL in question is supposed to be a JSON file linking ...
6 votes
Accepted

Where are these spammy posts generated from?

Turns out, the WordPress install was indeed compromised. I did a diff of my existing install vs a new WordPress install, and diff reported new file: # diff -qr wordpress_installed/ wordpress_new/ ...
6 votes

Why am I getting foreign language spam with nothing to sell nor any links in the email?

I can't claim to know all the motivations of spam bots, but the main motivation is creating links to help SEO. Most of the bots submitting this form don't even realize that it is a contact form. ...
6 votes

Suspicious php links found on cPanel visitors

Random unexpected URLs on your should be returning "404 Not Found" status. When so many weird URLs return "301 Permanent Redirect" instead, it is often a sign that your site has ...
5 votes
Accepted

Is there a way to get rid of Google Analytics event tracking spam?

Recently there has been a spate of Google Analytics spammers. They typically: Send requests directly to Google's collector script without ever hitting your website. Put advertisements for their ...
5 votes
Accepted

How to block Googlebot from accessing one specific page

Since this does appear to be the real Googlebot, the recommended way to block access/crawling is to use /robots.txt: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /blocked.php However, if you still want to block ...
  • 42.2k
5 votes

Suspicious php links found on cPanel visitors

I looked up the IP 185.191.171.42, and it seems to be owned by SEMRush. So the possible reason is that you have second-hand domain that the old owner created those pages and SEMRush still has the list ...
4 votes
Accepted

What is forum20.smailik.org referral traffic?

I would check your log files to see if this is referrer traffic to your site as opposed to Google Analytics. There is a new spam technique seen here: How to fight off Google Analytics referrer ...
  • 32.7k
4 votes

Is there a way to get legitimate but spammy words past filters?

I doubt you can, because if you can, so can spammers. I suggest you get your other points as low as you possibly can, the following should help you get a lot further: Set an SPF record Create a DKIM ...
  • 6,776
4 votes

How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?

To answer your title question directly "How to fight off referrer spammers" the simplest answer is to drop Google Analytics and switch to Piwik, which automatically blocks all referrer spam by default....
  • 2,271
4 votes
Accepted

Fixing my mail servers outgoing IP being on spam blacklists

Don't bother getting that IP off those lists. Too much effort, outcome uncertain, and no guarantee for the future. How much mail do you send? Is that hundreds of mails per months, or tens of ...
  • 156
4 votes
Accepted

How to remove spam URL from Google Search Console

Google does not punish your site for 404 errors - their 404 report is purely informational, and meant to notify you in case you see any URLs in the report that are not actually supposed to be 404. It'...
3 votes

Gmail flags email as spam if it contains link to my website

From Google's bulk senders guidelines: While Gmail works hard to deliver all legitimate mail to a user's inbox, it's possible that some legitimate messages may be marked as spam. Gmail does not ...
3 votes

Block rank-checker.online

This isn't a direct answer to your question but to your problem: Try a hostname filter on your Analytics account instead. Filter only for your domain. The only situation in which you'll get views ...
  • 3,963
3 votes

Blocked by Disqus from posting on my own site

Other than contacting them for a review of your case there is no way to fix this, and creating a new account you will probably find will result in the same thing happening with the new account as most ...
3 votes
Accepted

New Website, Digital Ocean spam traffic very high on Google Analytics

@closetnoc was right. I have contacted Digital Ocean and they responded with: It looks like these IPs are related to a monitoring service, are you currently subscribed to one? If not, it's ...
  • 113
3 votes

Spam backlinks on sub-domain, does it affect main domain ranking

Google only punishes sites or pages that are indexed. If the sub domain is no longer in it's index then there is nothing to punish, it'll only become a problem if you are redirecting the sub domain to ...
  • 32.8k
3 votes
Accepted

My site is falsely classified as malicious by Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

Unfortunately at this time Microsoft does not have a global "Report a False Positive" feature which would allow your website to be scanned, re-assessed and marked as safe for all 365 users. There is ...
3 votes
Accepted

Find external site which sends 404 URL to my website

Take a look at https://www.searchviu.com/en/spam-traffic-google-analytics/. This is a good article on setting up GTM with additional parameters so that the only hits that show up in Analytics are ...
  • 3,013
3 votes

How do I know if a site linking to me is spam that needs to be disavowed?

In general, Google is good at filtering out spammy links when ranking your site. According to Google, disavowal is only useful in specific circumstances. You should disavow backlinks only if: You ...
3 votes

Suspicious php links found on cPanel visitors

I think might be "hacked". xmlrpc is a common attacked used by hackers alike. I use Wordpress Expose from Chris G. Herbert to check if it can list username. I don't know the exact. But some ...
2 votes

What kind of spam is this on our form?

The spammer is probably following this pattern, adapted from legitimate SEO folks who test Google indexing: Find a few long strings that return no Google results. Submit the strings to your form ...
  • 529
2 votes

How to avoid getting spam through a website?

Use multiple techniques and you can catch all spammers: honeypot as mentioned speed (bots fill forms very quickly) duplication (multiple text-fields like address plus comments) links in the wrong ...
  • 51
2 votes

Identical spam coming from many different (but similar) IP addresses

The Stop Forum Spam site is a resource to help block forum spammers. Its database can be queried manually or by API by IP address, username, or email address. For Simple Machines Forum (SMF) sites I ...
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