Malicious bot attack?
-
Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet.
Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank.
Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based.
Has anyone seen this before?
-
I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months?
Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern.
I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.
-
try
http://sucuri.net/website-firewall/
or
Stop bot attack resulting in a more secure website. Stop bots
-
Google analytics has issue with ghost referrals and find out what the referral name is parking in the block it in GA
UA numbers ending in two and three are not effected for some reason
You're hosting company can update software in order to make this stop
hope this helps
Tom
-
I would strongly recommend Cloudflare to address this type of problem. They have massive data on malicious sources and offer tools to mitigate attacks like you're facing.
-
Have you tried digging deeper into the type of browser and OS they're emulating? Chances are you could get a pretty precise block on just their activity if you match up their browser, screen dimension, OS, versions, etc without affecting any other users.
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
-
Inbound links with malicious anchor text. Negative seo attack
Hi, What to do with more than 300 links with a malicious anchor text that has nothing to do with my content. I am disavowing those links for the last 5 years. Some of them are directed to URLs that have been changed more than 8 years ago. How can I block this malicious behavior? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
How to stop google bot from crawling spammy injected pages by hacker?
Hello, Please help me. Our one of website is under attack by hacker once again. They have injected spammy URL and google is indexing, but we could not find these pages on our website. These all are 404 Pages. Our website is not secured. No HTTPS Our website is using wordpress CMS Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShahzadAhmed0 -
It's possible a bounce-rate attack manipulate SEO?
My site has been visited by unusual users with one second session times. This leaves my analytics data confused.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CompraBit0 -
Has our site been attacked?
Hello fellow mozers! I am having a problem you might be able to help me with and any thoughts on the issue will be greatly appreciated. Yesterday, I received an automated monthly report from Quill Engage, a tool that fetches data from Google Analytics and generates reports in a narrative format. Last month's 'referral traffic' section indicates two incredibly spammy websites driving more than 200 sessions to our website. Naturally, I checked out GWT and Open Site Explorer but couldn't find any traces of such activity. Futhermore, all our metrics seem ok. Can this possibly be a negative SEO attack that was only traced by the aforementioned tool? Can you propose any other way to test this and make sure we're not being attacked?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SMD_0 -
Negative SEO Click Bot Lowering My CTR?
I am questioning whether one of our competitors is using a click bot to do negative SEO on our CTR for our industry's main term. Is there any way to detect this activity? Background: We've previously been hit by DoS attacks from this competitor, so I'm sure their ethics/morals wouldn't prevent them from doing negative SEO. We sell an insurance product that is only offered through broker networks (insurance agents) not directly by the insurance carriers themselves. However, our suspect competitor (another agency) and insurance carriers are the only ones who rank on the 1st page for our biggest term. I don't think the carrier sites would do very well since they don't even sell the product directly (they have pages w/ info only) Our site and one other agency site pops onto the bottom of page one periodically, only to be bumped back to page 2. I fear they are using a click bot that continuously bounces us out of page 1...then we do well relatively to the other pages on page 2 and naturally earn our way back to page 1, only to be pushed back to page 2 by the negative click seo...is my theory. Is there anything I can do to research whether my theory is right or if I'm just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheDude0 -
Web virus attack every second
Hello my wordpress has been constantly attacked every day, files were uploaded and redirections were made to others websites. I instaled sucruri pluggin paying the annual fee, and no result. They keep acessing the web. And i uploading backup security. Know i have instaled OSE wp firewall and seems that they are getting more dificulty accessing and uploading files. But still sending like 40 attacks every day. Is ther any way to stop this? were is some information of the blocked attacks LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:58:01 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/27.153.210.183 REFERRER: http://www.propdental.com/index.php?option=com_registration&task=register LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:52:09 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/2a00:1d70:c01c::69:61 URI: http://www.propdental.com/video//wp-admin.php FROM IP 40 attacks this ip every two seconds: http://whois.domaintools.com/2a00:1d70:c01c::69:61 URI: http://www.propdental.com/video//wp-admin.php ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:49:10 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/103.31.186.82 URI: http://www.propdental.com/ METHOD: GET LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:37:10 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/120.43.11.251 URI: http://www.propdental.com/blog/tag/carillas-de-porcelana-cerinate METHOD: GET USERAGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.95 Safari/537.11 REFERRER: http://www.propdental.com/blog/tag/carillas-de-porcelana-cerinate ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:28:52 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/36.251.43.51 URI: http://www.propdental.com/ METHOD: GET USERAGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4 REFERRER: http://www.buyclassybags.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Attacked with spam links.
Our website was hit with the "Pharma hack", "Google Cloaking Hack", or "Blackhat SEO Spam". and Google showed in the results this website may be compromised. After cleaning out the hack from the website I chacked with the Seomoz tool Open Site Explorer and I found that they hacked 1000 of other websites and created links to my website. They were building a few 1000 links to the website with the clickable text "buy cheap online pharmacy". and more like that. This website www.washington23.com has been hacked and gives over 200 links to your website for pharmacy items. And Google considers this from your impotent links as i can see in webmasters. What can I do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Francisco_Meza0