Spammy Traffic Followed by Drop in Google Traffic

[ryandiscord]

I'm not sure what to make of this but, I've got a client site that in 2015, Google Analytics shows traffic from google, direct and referral to a nonexistent directory on their site with various porn related urls. The referral traffic is from sites that have the google custom search feature. I can't find any of these links in ahrefs. Also the host name is some random dentist website.

Could this have been an attempt at negative SEO or just referral spam? The rankings did drop shortly after but there was also the mobile update and content quality update not too long after.

Any thoughts?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've never seen this. Did you find out anything else? I've seen some crazy stuff like mass spam linking to images, which managed to get a site penalized.

Seeing those porn URL's coming from Google even if they don't exist in a nonexistent directory sounds like some hostname spoofing. I can't imagine that that would tank the site, especially if it's not links and didn't get anything new indexed, and there was no cloaking to those pages. That could have been what it was though, a failed attempt at cloaking some porn or viagra spam on your domain and then they started getting traffic to it through shady means, but it didn't exist.

 

[JasonSc]

I had a site that got hacked, and the hackers had basically spoofed login pages to major sites, like outlook, dropbox etc, trying to capture peoples login pages.

Analytics showed a bunch of different referral traffic during the time frame the site was compromised.

I'm not saying this is what happened to you, but worth 10 minutes of looking into.