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
-
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. spam-traffic.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Nivik230 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?
I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.
Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli0 -
Referral Traffic Issue
I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche. That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link. These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate. The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?
Reporting & Analytics | | MickEdwards0 -
Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index
My web site sells shoes. These items go out of fashion and are replaced. Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index using webmaster tools. I seem to have a massive 301 list that carries on growing and Im concerned that to carry on doing 301s is not the right way.
Reporting & Analytics | | weddingshoesandaccessories0 -
Universal Analytics: Why does Google Organic appear as Direct traffic?
Hi there, When I enter the site via Google Search and follow myself via Real-Time Analytics I appear an organic visitor (which is good). When I browse and visit the site I still am an organic visitor. However, as soon as I fill in the contact form (gravity forms) and land on the "thank you page" I appear as a direct visitor with Google as the source. Since I have the thank you page set-up as a goal, Analytics incorrectly attributes these conversions to the direct medium instead of the organic medium. The tracking code has been installed on all the pages and all conversions are being recorded. What is going on?
Reporting & Analytics | | Robbern0 -
Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?
Hello Everybody, Can somebody help me figure out this puzzle: My WMT is showing 6000 clicks, while my Organic Traffic in Google Analytics is showing only 3500 daily ... how is that possible? Best Regards
Reporting & Analytics | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
Can you get local search numbers/traffic out of Google Analytics?
With Google's new local search I am more curious as to market penetration on keywords that are now localized to my different US cities. I understand that you can separate out Google traffic based on regional Google domains, but I am curious if there is an effective way to separate out searches and keywords based on a my local US Metros? If google cannot do this, any recommendations on products that can? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Thos0031