What is Referral Spam in SEO?

In the world of SEO, there are numerous factors that affect your visitor traffic in conversions. Organic, direct, and social traffic are one of the most widely known, but referral traffic is something that every website should be considering and have a strong plan to handle. But what is this referral traffic and why can it be affecting my results on the website? Learn more about referral traffic here!

 

What Is Referral Traffic?

Referral Traffic is traffic that originates from an external website to your site. As basic as this sounds, this traffic encompasses a large variety of referrals from pages such as directories, blogs, site pages, and more. An example of a referral visit is when someone visits your local chamber of commerce’s website and finds your listing and they then click a link to your website. These visitors are being referred to your website via an external page, bringing a visitor who may have not found your website otherwise.

 

Is This Good Traffic?

Depends. Referral traffic from reputable directories is something your website should strive for, but many of these strong sources are dwindling with the growth of paid referrals on directories and phising directories out to attain your personal information. For this reason, Google has been penalizing sites that have their information listed on bad pages. Be sure to research each website you have a referral link to. This can be done by reviewing your Google Analytics information. Search referrals coming to your page and take these links and reverse Google them to see if these have been listed as reputable pages. If you do find non reputable pages, what can you do.

 

  • Request Your Sites Removal: Many of these pages have a contact us page where you can request that your website be removed from the page. It is unlikely that they will respond to your request, but if you are ever in a pickle with Google, you can show that you gave due diligence in dealing with the matter.

 

  • Block This Page From Your Referral Traffic: This is very important to not skew your SEO traffic results and conversions. If you continue to allow these fake or bad site visits to your page, your traffic may seem higher than what it really is and your conversions lower because they are not converting. Simply login to your analytics and use your admin settings to block traffic from specific sites.

This can be a lot to take in, but getting assistance from a local SEO management team can help you boost your traffic and conversions with ease. Contact Atria today!