As part of our standard operating procedure around here we setup all of our sites with Google Analytics including goal tracking and funnel pages. Recently however I came across an anomaly on one of our client’s sites. I’m not at liberty to reveal the client so I can’t back up what I’m about to tell you with screenshots, however I am fairly confident that goal tracking via Analytics can play a large part in determining how Google calculates sitelinks. How? A form spammer recently spammed the hell out of one of our forms that was tied to a goal conversion. The site in question is little more than an SEO directory of states and the form spammer just happened to trip conversions in analytics on the South Dakota page. Now I can promise you we get very light traffic on the South Dakota page compared to some of the larger states like NY and California, however over the course of a week the spammer completed 100’s of conversions on the page before we were able to beef up countermeasures. A couple of weeks later I noticed a funny thing in my Google Webmaster Tools account: the South Dakota page had been picked up as a sitelink.

Some specifics for my blackhat readers:

All ip’s used by the spammer were from the same subnet, but were more or less unique ip’s.
The site typically has 50-100 conversions per day.