Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
-
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely.
The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following:
Browser size visits:
620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5.
Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted.
If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know.
-
Thanks for your insights John. I was hoping, albeit naively, that there was some overlooked silver bullet that I could apply but it does seem that this issue is not going to be solved by some mystical cure-all. Your suggestion of inspecting the browser size is probably the best bet. Unwanted traffic will still slip through, but I should be able to minimize it quite a bit.
-
This is a tough question. I had something similar happen - a lot of distributed traffic, that wasn't real but looks real-ish. I don't remember the screen sizes we had, but it was mostly old-ish versions of IE.
Since the main action people do on our site is Search, we added a ReCaptcha after people search a certain number of times. We also found some paths the spammers take through the site and created some controls to block, or Captcha, those paths. It's a tough balance, though, because you don't want to ban real users from the site.
Could you use some JS to inspect the browser, then set a cookie? Then your server-side could look for the cookie on subsequent requests and send them to /stop-eating-my-bandwidth-you-jerk.html or a more business-friendly equivalent.
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
-
Impressions clicks and traffic drop
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
So something weird is going on, i run a few websites for clients, few different CMS. there has been a constant increase in traffic and ranking on one wordpress website and now the squarespace website is climbing up in rankings in the past few months. both has GTM installed for months, which has been optimized regularly.
for the wordpress website, in the past 2 weeks, starting June 4th, on google search console the clicks and impressions has started going down to the point that i lost 90% of clicks and impressions and traffic on analytics has started dropping a few days later, now at about 60% less traffic. for the Squarespace website, exactly the same thing, started June 7th and drop in clicks/impressions (though ranking increase) and then traffic drop. checked both GTM for recent changes incase of wrong code implement, no changes, no new major issues.
different hostings different CMS, no link between them. i just cant put my finger what is going on. anyone got any idea what is going on?0 -
Community Discussion - Do you think increasing word count helps content rank better?
In the online marketing community, there is a widespread belief that long-form content ranks better. In today's YouMoz post, Ryan Purthill shares how his research indicated 1,125 to be a magic number of sorts: The closer a post got to this word count, the better it ranked. Diminishing returns, however, were seen once a post exceeded 1,125 words. Does this jibe with your own data and experiences? Do you think increasing word count helps content rank better in general? What about for specific industries and types of content? Let's discuss!
Reporting & Analytics | | Christy-Correll6 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Need help with excluding IP addresses in Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, are you able to add more than 1 IP address to an exclude filter? I found this article, http://www.creare.co.uk/filter-multiple-ip-addresses-in-google-analytics, but wasn't sure if it was the right way to do this or if I should create a new filter for each IP address. Also, when I try to create a new filter, it only will let me select from a list of profiles I have created whereas on other accounts I've been able to create several new filters without any problems. Does anyone know why this might be?
Reporting & Analytics | | jfeitlinger0 -
Does PPC affect SEO Traffic?
Last week my website (www.cooke.co.uk) started PPC advertising with Google. This has been successful in increasing the amount of overall traffic to the site. However, since we started the PPC advertising, our traffic from organic search has decreased significantly. Our rankings haven't changed dramatically enough to warrant such a decrease. Has anyone else been in a situation where organic traffic has dropped as a result of launching a paid campaign? What did you do to rectify it? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Analytics not tracking traffic from Old Domain Redirect
We've recently 301 redirected one of our client's domains to their new website and the strange thing is, we aren't seeing an increase in traffic in analytics. You would expect the traffic to increase roughly by the traffic volume from the old domain. There were a few hundred redirects and we tested a large sample and the redirects have been implemented properly. Is there something that we did incorrectly in our implementation of the domain redirect? Or is there something else that we need to do in Analytics to properly track those redirects?
Reporting & Analytics | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
How to find goo.gl/ URLs in Google Analytics
Hello! How does one go about finding the impact of goo.gl/ shortened URLs in Google Analytics? (I know I should be using Campaigns, but this was for an old project.) Thanks in advance! Erik
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO0 -
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