Unexplained spikes in Google Analytics
-
My site has modest traffic (50 unique visitors per day). In the past week, I've seen two unexplained spikes in my Google Analytics. Yesterday, there were 140 unique visitors, and these unique visitors each visited one unique page. This appears to be a bot of some sort. If this is a bot, why does Google Analytics think these are unique visitors? Is there a was for small sites to deal with this?
Best,
Christopher -
Many people experience the 'google Tease', where for days at a time, in blocks you will sometimes see these bumps in traffic. A recent article talking about this, I put in below.
I bet, more than likely - this is the case.. but you could go back over trending data and look to see if it has happened before and if you see patterns in the these traffic increases
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-tease-14587.html
Cheers. Hope this helps a little.
Oh - I should also add that you should block any and all IP's in GA tracking that might screw the data (remove your IP, friends or office IP's, network IP's from people you know etc)... so clean the data up.. if you haven't already
-
Hi Christopher,
Take a look in GA and see if all of the visitors have the exact same version of java or flash and are coming from the same city. I've had this happen before, and on a site where I had a secondary tracking method where I could see it was just the same user.
One guess I had is that the user is in incognito mode in their browser, so you don't see a referring site and see it as a direct visit to a wide variety of internal pages.
-
Grant me viewer's access, if you want, I will take a look. Here is my email: slavarybalko@gmail.com
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Browser Size = Not Set Filter in Google Analytics
I have been trying to filter this traffic out of my Google Analytics data since it all seems to be related to spam traffic. I have had multiple instances wherein using this filter:
Technical SEO | | fuelmedical
(Backslash not displaying in message preview - I have written backlash to indicate its placement in the filter) Custom Filter - Exclude - Browser Size - ^backlash(not setbackslash)$ Traffic seems to appropriately filter out - but then the filter ceases working. In looking at a new site with Browser Size = (not set) traffic the filter preview doesn't appear to work either. Am I implementing the filter incorrectly? How do I filter this traffic out of GA data sucessfully? If I use the exact same method using RegEx in Google Data Studio - the filter works perfectly.1 -
Does google look at H3 tags?
I've had someone tell me that google doesn't pay attention to H3 tags -- only H1 and H2. I haven't found much online to back this up or discredit it; thought I'd ask the Moz community!
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick5 -
Google page speed testing failures
When running our domain through google's page speed insights I'm getting the error message 'An error occurred while fetching or analyzing the page' at around 65% load. I'm concerned it's affecting our organic rankings. The domain is https://www.scottscastles.com/ When testing in https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/ it is also failing at around 70% with the message 'It's taking longer than expected. You can leave this tab open and check back in a little while. We'll have your results soon.' but the results never come. I've tried testing on a few different speed testing sites without failures (https://tools.pingdom.com, https://gtmetrix.com, https://www.webpagetest.org and a few others). We’re stumped as everything appears correct and was working but now isn't. Is this Google or us, or a combination of the two? Any help greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Google Rejects Merchant Feed
Buon Giorno fromn 1 degrees C nearly dark & icy wetherby Uk... WTF Googles merchant centre has rejected my feed and In the time honoured zero customer service Ive grown accustomed to getting from Santa Clara County ive got bugger all idea how to fix it. Here is the feed:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://ramsdensforcash.co.uk/sitefiles/handlers/googlemerchantdatafeed.ashx And here is the violation from the Google Gods themselves: http://ramsdensforcash.co.uk/sitefiles/handlers/googlemerchantdatafeed.ashx Anyone got any ideas why Google has given me the middle finger? Greazie tanto,
David0 -
Can I turn off Google site links?
I thought at one time I had turned off the option to have Google sitelinks. I did this so that each of our pages that had a strong presence would occupy a unique slot on the first and second page of Google. This was important to us as we were battling some reputation management issues and trying to push out negative listings from the front page. Recently I noticed sitelinks were back up and when going into Google Webmaster Tools, I could figure out how to opt out of them. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BRConsulting0 -
Google webmaster tools
I have linked webmaster tools to Google analytics account. My question is where can i see Webmaster reports in Google analytics ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0 -
How to disallow google and roger?
Hey Guys and girls, i have a question, i want to disallow all robots from accessing a certain root link: Get rid of bots User-agent: * Disallow: /index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=tellafriend%26productId=* Will this make the bots not to access any web link that has the prefix you see before the asterisk? And at least google and roger will get away by reading "user-agent: *"? I know this isn't the standard proceedure but if it works for google and seomoz bot we are good.
Technical SEO | | iFix0