Direct traffic coming to URLs with /rss_feedIP#
-
I'm doing a site audit for an organization that has a bunch of really messy old Drupal sites. In looking at their traffic, I see that a majority of it is coming to landing pages that look like this:
http://clientsdomain.com/rss_feed173.8.208.97 plus other IP addresses.
The bounce rate is 100% and time on site is less than a second. It looks like something that an RSS feed tool might use, but I've never seen something like it before. It creates its own landing page, hits the site, then appears to bounce. This is making their Analytics data look a whole lot worse than the site is actually doing, since the bounce rate is 100% on all that fake traffic.
I have some experience with Drupal, but I've never seen anything like this in Drupal or any other CMS.
Has anyone out there ever experienced something like this, where direct traffic comes to an rss feed landing page and bounces immediately?
-
Hi Natalie,
What's the RSS plugin that your client's site is using?
-
Hi again
My bad! Did you try checking your internal links or sitemap? A quick crawl with ScreamingFrog can help pinpoint any link issues.
Also did you check the hostname on those links? Does it come up as our domain? Just want to double check that it isn't referral.
Let me know! Good luck!
-
Thanks, Patrick! The strange thing is that this comes as direct traffic, not referral traffic. We've definitely experienced the referral spam phenomenon, but this is like nothing I've ever seen. I don't think it's spam, but I'm not sure how or why it's being created.
I'll filter the landing pages from Analytics, but we're mostly just curious where and why those URLs are being created / hit.
Thanks again.
-
Hi there
This happens time to time - what you can do is create a filter to eliminate this traffic from your GA reporting.
Here's a few great resources:
How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data
What to Do About Fake BS Surge of Google Analytics Visits Definitive Guide to Removing Referral SpamYou could also take the time to go through your backlinks and see if any of them are worth removing or disavowing. Since this is a RSS Feed, it won't be very easy at all, but this is a nice process to have in your back pocket if needed.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Google Analytics direct traffic dropped by 50% after switching to https
Hi, everyone, have a little dilemma and was hoping to get some advice here. I recently installed a new SSL (3 months ago) to force our URL to start with https://. The site was earlier accessible through https:// and http:// prefix however now I have made it so that all urls are redirected to the correct https:// version. The problem is that direct traffic has dropped by more than 50% after implementing these changes and I can for the life of me figure out why. Why would the direct traffic drop all of sudden after making these changes? I am starting to suspect that the earlier data was inflated and that Google analytics was counting users coming from a http:// version of the URL to a https:// version of the URL was counted as direct traffic. Could that be it? Any other possible causes? Would really appreciate any guidance on this problem. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | nsereke0 -
Measure traffic from serp feature
Hey 🙂 Does anyone know if there's a way of measuring traffic coming through serp features? I know that you can get some info on SEMrush but not traffic coming from those specific results like stories and instant answers. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Anna_90 -
How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc. What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help? Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO2 -
How do sites without access to a site's analytical data, determine a site's organic traffic?
I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?
Reporting & Analytics | | Deacyde0 -
Google analytics : exclude traffic to a subdomain
Hi, I have a website with a client access on a subdomain. I want to exclude the traffic to that subdomain because it messes up my conversion goal for the main site. Per example, 2 out of 10 visitors are existing clients that want to access to my SaaS product. The 8 other are potential clients. I want to exclude the 2 clients from my stats so I could have the good conversion percentage for my free trial for the other 8 potential clients. Thanks in advance for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | slestage0 -
Strange 404 Error URL
Can anyone help determine how a URL like "www.mycompany.com/lago_www.bad-nsfw-content.com" would appear on the "not found" crawl error list in Google Webmaster Tools? The "www.bad-nsfw-content" site has nothing to do with our company and I don't how it would get associated with our site.
Reporting & Analytics | | pbhatt0 -
What impact will Google's 10/18/2011 announcement of 'Making Search More Secure' have on the ability to track specific keyword queries via Analytics?
The full announcement is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html My concern is that the ability for Google Analytics to parse information on specific keyword queries will be diminished. The article hints that Google Webmaster Tools will be exempt from the problem, and I've never relied on Webmaster tools as a go-to for tying specific keyword queries to Goal Tracking (form submissions and sales). The community's thoughts on this one are appreciated. 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | MKR_Agency0 -
301 redirects reduce traffic considerably
I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like: /articles/my-article-name /articles/my-article-name.aspx /articles/My-Article-Name We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting. Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough. After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version. This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so. Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version. I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Reporting & Analytics | | MarkWill0