Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed
-
For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site.
We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case.
It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off.
Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site.
(FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.
-
Just as EGOL describe it.
If you're on Amazon AWS then you can use their CloudFront as CDN. But also you can observe source of traffic. Could coming from one country, one IP range or one user-agent. There should be some kind of pattern and you should investigate it.
Then just need to make rule to block that traffic or just redirect them to one static "hello world" page.
I was also victim of such traffic, but was from humans trying to depleting an AdWords daily budget. Once budget it over ads was stopped showing, after few hours they recalculate clicks, some funds was returned, ads are shown again, they click it, budget is over... and so on.
-
By resetting your DNS to CF, your server is no longer used. All traffic is routed to one of CF's data centers and there are over 100 of them distributed throughout the world.
Also, in the CF settings, you want to "challenge" the visitors from problem countries. This will give them a captcha to complete. When they complete that captcha one time, you can then give them long term access without the challenge. CF will progressively become better at filtering the bots and allowing more trusted visitors in without a challenge.
-
Thanks for your help - this works to a large degree.
Have hit a new challenge though, our AWS servers are in one of these countries which are sending traffic. And we have multiple servers talking to each other enabling Login / other actions on the site.
While I have blocked all the other countries, blocking country with AWS servers is creating problem with Login. Trying to figure this out!
-
If you don't use Firewall, Cloudflare in your situation will have almost no effect.
We used our analytics to determine the countries where the traffic was coming from. Then went into CF FW.
Click the blue Help link for each tool to decide upon the settings that you want to try.
Here is what we used....
Security Level... Medium
Challenge Passage... one day
Access rules.... country name, challenge, this website
Impact of the above.... Many bots already recognized by CF will be blocked. Access rules will present each visitor from those countries a form similar to a captcha. They must pass the captcha to get in.
After you turn this on, watch your short term stats. You should see an increase in blocking.
We ran the above for a few weeks without any obvious SEO impact. Then switched our DNS back to normal, moving away from CF.... but kept the $20/month account and our settings in place. CF was time-consuming to set up.
-
This looks very similar to what we are seeing. We took CloudFlare as well - but stayed with Free account with "Site Under Attack" mode, which should force the visits to verify.
Will it be possible for you to share the settings on CloudFlare? Did you use their Firewall as well? Also, did you see any SEO impact, by any chance?
-
One morning, a few months ago we saw lots of mobile phone traffic building. All was hitting our homepage which is very resource intensive. All of this traffic generated one page view. All of the traffic was coming from a few countries in Asia and Africa. No referrer. Looked like a DDOS attack.
We go to Cloudflare, got a $20/month account, switched DNS to CF, forced untrusted visits from those countries to verify before allowing entry. Squeezed this traffic down to almost nothing within a few hours. Left CF run for a few weeks. Rouge traffic disappeared.
Now we have CF ready to go with all settings in place. Can turn it on in two minutes and have the shield in place as DNS propagates.
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
-
Need some help/input about my Joomla sitemap created by XMap
Here is my current sitemap for my site http://www.yakangler.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1 I have some questions about it's current settings. I have a component called JReviews that xmap produces a separate link for each category. ex: http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/265-2013-hobie-mirage-adventure-island 2014-09-03T20:46:25Z monthly 0.4 http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/266-2012-wilderness-systems-tarpon-140 2014-06-03T15:49:00Z monthly 0.4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mr_w
http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review/343-wilderness-systems-tarpon-120-ultralite 2013-11-25T06:39:05Z monthly 0.4 Where as my other articles are only linked by the content category. ex: http://www.yakangler.com/news monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/tournaments monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/kayak-events monthly 0.4
http://www.yakangler.com/spotlight monthly 0.4 Which option is better?0 -
Are Their Any SEO Dangers When Cleaning Up a Site
I'm doing some housekeeping on my website. Removing old blogs that are out of date (2008) or things have moved on. The blogs I'm removing are being 301'd to relevant newer blogs. Can this type of clean up cause any problems that affect the optimisation of a site? Looking forward to hearing your views. Christina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
.com ranked where .co.uk site should After Manual Penalty Revoked - Help!!!
Hi All, I wondered if some could help me as I am at my wits end. Our website www.domain.co.uk was hit with a manual penalty back in April 26th 2012 for over optomizing our inbound links and after 9 reconciliation request later and over a year and many links removed the penalty was revoked. Yay I hear you cry! During the year .co.uk was banned we built .com yet did not build any links to it. The purpose of the .com site was to attract an American audience for our products. .com was hosted on a US server and Geo Targeting set to United States in WMT. So here is my problem after the ban was revoke we expected .co.uk to spring back to some reasonable positions. Nope that is not the case Google now is ranking our .com site where our .co.uk should be for powerdull keywords in position 1st to 10th .com has Zero link equity and .co.uk is very reasonable, So how can I rectify this balls ups and get co.uk listed back where it should be…. I am not bothered where .com ranks. Note: To the best of my knowledge there are NO cross domain 301 or the like only an image link between the two sites. I have posted this on WMT forum and it has fallen on deaf ears! ....help me MOZ members you’re my only hope! Thanks in advance Richard PS: If anyone would like the URL’s in question PM me and I will let you know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tricky-400 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
Are seo press releases with links from PRWEB helpful ?
I am thinking of doing some press releases from PRWEB. they offer a press release with live links for better seo effect. Is this really effective ? Has any one seen this to be benficial ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
SEO consultant/expert
I am looking to hire an SEO expert that can not only make suggestions/perform audit, but also execute changes. Of course lots of companies are available, but I am ideally looking for an individual with a nice track record. No offense to SEO firms, but I am not interested in paying for overhead, etc. Curious to know if others have gone this route and what the experience has been like. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MNKid150 -
Where would the SEO juice go if I have a wordpress site hosted by godaddy?
I am planning on moving my website to a wordpress that is hosted by godaddy. I am wondering where the SEO juice that my website has already gained would go. Would it go to godaddy when I make the move instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
SEO for Log in Sites
Hello, I just lunched a website where you have to sign up and to log in in order to use it. So I have the home, also a blog but then the rest of the pages are let's say it "hidden".How would you do the seo for it? I have been cheking facebook, foursquare and some others and they use different approaches. Facebook uses the same description in every single page for example. My site is similar to foursquare users have profile, stats, history, ranking. Well, what is your advice?? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome0