Our organic homepage traffic just recently spiked from about a typical under 20 per weekend to about 820 -- what could be causing this?
-
Website: http://www.myinjuryattorney.com
Our homepage typically receives under 20 organic visitors per weekend, but I just checked traffic this morning, and it was at a whopping 821 for just Saturday and Sunday. It's already at 212 this morning.
I'm heavily assuming this is fake traffic as there were about 818 drop offs after visiting the homepage, an 84.41% bounce rate, and an average session duration of 5 seconds. Our typical metrics -- last weekend for example, were: 13 visitors to the homepage, 38% bounce, and an average session duration of 1 minute 26 seconds.
Does anyone know who or what could be causing this? Could it be a competitor using negative SEO of some sort? Thank you in advance.
-
Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you.
1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions?
2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients. -
-
Hi Brett - I was able to go into this filter and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
-
Hi Rick,
Since I haven't seen a response yet, I'm assuming I wasn't clear enough in my explanation so I went into an unfiltered view for one of my clients and found some ghost spam, then skitched it so you could see how to get there and examine it yourself on your website. Hope this helps!
-
Not just yet. Click on the secondary dimension drop down bar and type in hostname, or find it under the behavior bar. You can also look at just google traffic by clicking on Google first then setting the hostname as the secondary dimension. It should become apparent at that point if you have a lot of bots spoofing your traffic with a fake source.
-
Hi Brett - thank you! Do I have this set up right? I'm just seeing normal sources from what I can tell. https://www.screencast.com/t/t9VW5tSz
-
Yes, because this filter is based on the hostname. If a bot is spoofing the source but does not have a valid hostname (and most will not) then it will be filtered out by the include filter. Go into your GA data, go down to the source/medium report under acquisitions and set the secondary dimension to hostname.
If you're seeing something like (not set) next to Google/Organic traffic in the source then that's spam. I've got some in my unfiltered views as well. From the article I sent you:
"On the other hand, valid traffic will always use a real hostname. In most of the cases, this will be the domain. But it also can also result from paid services, translation services, or any other place where you've inserted GA tracking code."
So just make sure you compile a list of all the valid hostnames for your website and you should be fine.
-
Hi Brett,
Thank you for the info. Would all of this still apply if the traffic is considered organic and not referral?
-
Hi Rick,
Try checking your traffic against the secondary dimension "hostname". If a large number appear to be invalid hostnames then you've got yourself an answer. Referral traffic, also known as ghost spam, can be removed with an include filter. Moz wrote a great guide on how to do this here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
If you're at all concerned that the traffic could be ghost spam and you don't have this filter in place, then an easy means of checking is to implement the filter on a test view and see how it impacts your data. Just make sure you create a new view to test it on first, because I had a client accidentally exclude all of his valid hostnames and lost every last bit of actionable data.
Hope this helps!
-
Have you checked the landing pages that relate to the keywords? In that case you would hopefully be able to see what kind of pages are trending at the moment and increasing your traffic. A big increase in traffic might have an influence, but in the end 800 searches more daily are not that much.
-
I noticed a few months ago, that type of traffic was not just showing up under referral but also under organic in GA. As far as i am concerned, just another problem plaguing GA/GWMT.
Matt
-
Hi Martijn,
I'm checking now and for some reason it's not reflecting the high # of visitors. All of the queries also seem normal, and it's showing that none have been repeated over 5 times. There are however a ton of different, but pretty normal ones appearing. Any additional insight given that info? Thanks!!
-
Hi Matt, thanks for the quick answer! All of this traffic is actually showing up under our organic rather than referral
-
Sounds like you are experiencing "Referral Spam". Have you checked the sources in Google Analytics? It is essentially a spammy way of advertising domains and services.
Here are a few links to help you understand and fix the issue:
- https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
- If you have GA: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en
Good Luck,
Matt
-
Hi Rick,
If you connected Google Search Console to your site you should be able to see in the Search Analytics data what kind of keywords did trigger the traffic. It could always be fake traffic but sometimes you just get lucky with certain keywords that you appear to rank for all of a sudden.
Martijn.
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
-
Blcoking Analytics Spam Referral Traffic
Hello, I'm starting to find some of our sites being heavily affected by spam referral traffic. I've been doing a bit of research, but it seems advice is changing all the time (or trying to sell me a service) Does anyone have any suggestions (or links to point me to) on the best way to block spam referral traffic (All our sites are Wordpress). Is there a way of blocking from past data or only future? Will blocking affect past moz data or is that permanently contaminated? I really don't quite understand what is in it for these spammers. Any advice greatly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Besides technical error improvement, best way to increase organic traffic to movie review website
I have a friend's website, ShowBizJunkies, that they work very had at improving and providing great content. I put the website in a more modern theme, increased speed (wpengine, but maxed out with cdn, caching, image optimization, etc) But now I'm struggling how to suggest further improving the seo structure or building backlinks. I know trying to come up for those terms like "movie reviews" and many similar are ridiculously difficult, and requires tons of high quality backlinks. What is my lowest hanging fruit here, any suggestions? My current plan is: 1. Fix technical errors 2. Create more evergreen content 3. Work on timing of article release for better Google News coverage 4. More social sharing, sharing on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook Groups, G+ Communities, etc 5. Build backlinks via outreach to tv show specific sites, movie fan sites, actor fan sites (interviews)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JustinMurray1 -
Wordpress Category Archives - Index - but will this cause duplication?
Okay something I am struggling with Using YOAST - but have a recipe blog - However the category archives have /are being optimized and indexed as I am adding custom content to them , then listing the recipes below. My question is if I am indexing the Category Archives and using these to add custom content above - then allows the recipe excerpts from the category to be listed underneath - will these recipe excerpts be picked up as duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Whether letting an old category just 404 out is OK
Hello, We've got some hidden categories that are still indexed in the search engines. If there are no links to these hidden categories, can we just let them 404 out and be OK SEO wise? We can't 301 redirect them. It's about 50 categories.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What penalty would cause this traffic drop (Google Analytic Screenshot)
This ecommerce site was hit (mostly) slowly by updates but there is nothing in GWT. Below is the graph. Keep in mind that most of our traffic is return customers, so the drops don't look dramatic, but they are. "New Visitors" doesn't show the drop. This is a "Daily" Google Analytics setting. The drop I've circled is May 23-May 24, 2013. It was a huge hit in non-return customers. This graph is "Unique Visitors" I don't know why the "New Visitors" graph is not showing the dip Although we had some big drops, a lot of the drop was gradual. Any help in identifying what could be causing the problem is appreciated. ga.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Ecommerce Products on Homepage
Hi, If we highlight products on homepage, they rank better as they are linked to from the homepage - we cannot increase the amount of products or links on homepage for dilution reasons. So, if we change the products on homepage for some others, presumably those will get the link juice benefit? I think what I am asking is, is there any "longevity" once the product has been removed from the homepage as a link - will it lose it's "priority value" or will it retain some of it's importance after the homepage link has been removed? If that is the case, I could circulate my products via homepage over a course of time to help them all get some benefit no? Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
How should I look to gain traffic for a blog hosted on our own site?
Ok I know what you're going to say.. social media etc right? The problem is we do that already but we're stuck in an industry that just isn't very sexy! People reading twitter/facebook don't want to read about toilets in their spare time, or keep it as a hobby. If you search bathroom blog (uk google), you will see we are about 5th, it gets us no traffic, as I imagine it's not a popular term so I can see you starting to ask why we write a blog in the first place. We write the blog because at the moment the whole industry is dominated by pile it high sell it cheap online stores and all their blogs are written for google only so finding decent or unbiased advice is rare. Seriously, these guys are creating fake blogs and paying for links inside other blogs all over the place in order to boost their rankings so we figure if you really want some good advice people can't find it. If they find our blog they will get some good advice and good content.. and then the hope is that they give us a call and we can see if we can help them. The problem is these guys are hogging all the keywords.. and it seems the bathroom industry has very few keywords that people search! Now I know we are in it for the long haul.. so taking time doesn't bother me, but I was wondering if there were any tried and tested places to post a blog that could get us at least seen so that people could see how different our content is? Or if all else fails, can anyone suggest the right keywords to aim at besides the "bathroom suites" etc that these huge online stores dominate?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | willryles0 -
Any recent discoveries or observations on the "Official Line" of incoming link penalization?
I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out). I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this? Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveOllington1