Can malicious PPV traffic hurt my SEO?

Hi Everyone,

Starting yesterday I'm seeing thousands of hits from porn sites and ad networks that my site has nothing to do with.

My site has nice organic rankings and get a decent amount of traffic.
However, It seems that someone malicious (probably a competing site) started campaigns on low quality ad networks like PPV campaigns that popup my site on porn domains etc'.

I believe this is PPV traffic and not bots because most of the hits are from direct traffic and about 15% are from referrals, mostly ad networks (exoclick, adfly, propellerads) and porn sites. But it might be bots or a mix as well.

Questions:

1. The new malicious traffic is now about 60% of my total traffic - Can this hurt my SEO traffic in your opinion?
2. Any ideas on how I can stop this attack on my site?

I really hope someone here can help me.

Thanks!

 

Are you certain that these traffic is from paid sources?

And also ad traffic doesn't effect any site's search rankings so no effect to organic traffic.

 

Most of the sources are either ad networks or porn sites.
When I'm going to the referring pages there are no links to our site.

It feels like someone is showing popups with our URL using an ad network that uses a software that is installed on a user's computer (browser extension etc') and that software just triggers a popup on specific pages. I've encountered something similar in the past and it feels the same.

So we now have thousands of new users that hurt our analytic starts because it's 1 page sessions with 1-2 seconds on site, and targeted as porn/low quality clicks...
We're afraid that it will lower our rank on google because it might look like we are driving that kind of traffic and offering something to these kind of users - which can make google think we have adult content.

Thoughts? Anyone?

 

Check your links again now through any professional tool such as SEMrush. If the traffic is for links than they will hurt your site but if its from only ad networks than won't hurt your rankings.

 

Perhaps the ultimate target in Google’s eyes, spam bots which they attributed to spamdexing; a practice of generating thousands of poor-quality links thought abuse of comments. Today, such ‘link farming’ tactics can cause damage to the spammer’s target, causing its website to be “blacklisted” and totally removed from Google’s search pages.