Hi all, I am new to this forum so please forgive me if this question has been asked before, I did look around the forum but couldn’t find the question being asked previously. For about 5 years I have been a volunteer amateur website developer / admin for a small Not For Profit community club, and each month I prepare a report on the Management Board covering some basic statistics on visitors to their website using Google Analytics. My question is this, this month there has been a 100% increase in visitors, both new and returning to the site, nice if true, but reviewing the Page View statistics there is a large number of page views referenced as "'single slash'?from=http:'double slash'snip.to" and "'single slash'?from=http:'double slash'adf.ly'single slash'1SDmxr" to give examples of the six that appear for the month of November. (hope that is readable replacing the slashes with words as the forum wouldn't allow me to post the actual references) Could someone please explain how this is happening and how I might stop it occurring in the future? Thanks in advance for your assistance. Peter.
first up snippets from a screenshot would get around the link problem since you are only giving it as an example. adfly is a pay per action website and it would appear that someone has created links to the site - maybe part of a promotion? maybe they've hidden something illicit on the site that they are distributing I'm not sure how adfly works on the inside but I do know that commercial tweeters will follow and tweet random stuff so that their paid content is hidden. There could be a chance that is happening here too. Are the pages they're linking ok? legit?
Thanks Sarahk for your quick reply. Initially I was concerned about going to the site for fear of virus, but I did check out a couple of them and they may have legit, one has been removed. How they become inserted in the club's site I do not understand, as I said I am amateur. I have learnt Dreamweaver and coding on the run, I said I have been doing this for 5 years but in reality possible a lot more than that as I have done this over two stints as after it the first time for about 2 years it was taken back in house by office staff that had less clue than me, and I am not sure how they updated pages, but it all fell apart so back to me it came about 5 or so years ago. I am the only one from the club that updates the site so I am at a lost how this could happen. Any clues would be appreciated, thanks. I am going to upload a "clean" version of the site to see if that over comes the issue. Thanks again
If the site is that old and hasn't had the ftp settings reviewed or is using old database code then there are a few ways people can get in. For all that people slag off WordPress here, they're bloody good at keeping sites protected. It's the plugins that generally cause the problems.
Sarahk, thanks again. I only recreated the site some 6 months ago using Dreamweaver CS6 to make it multi device compatible so all old code had been removed. If it is an ftp setting issue is that an issue for the host site admin or something I should learn about? Thanks
Something you should learn about. You should have control via your ftp tool or your hosting control panel. There's tons of info online.
Thanks again. I have since my last post been in to the site's CPanel, I do have some understanding of using CPanel and looked at ftp, and there was one ftp account there that actually was setup by me many years ago when I was first given the job to look after the site. It was done due to my lack of understanding at the time on how to ftp the updates to the site, only ever used once. Anyway I have now removed it so hopefully once I upload a clean version of the site all should be fixed. Again thanks for your help.
Sarahk, The above is a grab of a directory on the host server The above is a grab of an individual file on the host server. Thanks
Its add traffic someone may have purchased from adfly, try 301 redirects to bounce of the traffic from the site to another page, This will decrease your bounce rate. Also make sure use a 3rd party tool like gostats to check the referral traffic
I would like to thank those that assisted me with this issue. Sorry it has taken me a while to acknowledge your assistance, but in the meantime I have had a couple of family issues to concentrate on. Cheers