Strange traffic.
-
We are a norwegian bakeshop (sykkelkompaniet.no) and we have started getting a lot of direct traffic from Miami and Chico. Wondering why, and suspect that someone is trying to hack our system. Any suggestions?
We have never been in Chico or in Miami... and we don't spend anything on marketing so far, furthermore we don't ship to the US. The traffic is about 800 unique hits a day.
-
Hi,
Can you grab the IP addresses of the visits, e.g. from server logs? It could be automated scraping - Googling some of the IPs will shed some light on that if that is the case, as folks will have posted about this on other forums and cited some of the IPs. If it's a scraper, it might identify itself via an ISP name as well, e.g. when Facebook crawls a page, it IDs itself and the crawl usually comes from Palo Alto or Menlo Park, California.
Coming from solely Miami and Chicago sounds suspicious or at least like automation - if this was natural US traffic, you would expect more geographical diversity, even if there was something that particularly interested people in those towns about your site.
Andy is 100% right about images too, at which point you can move the images to another file location.
-
A common one here is to look at the images on your site and make sure no-one is referencing them on their own site. This can increase hits to a site.
Does going through Google Analytics throw up any suggestions?
-Andy
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
-
COVID-19 Impacts on Traffic?
How many people here have witnessed some decline in traffic due to pandemic..? It's a thought that since people all around the world are in home and the usage of internet has increased a great deal the traffic on sites should also increase but that is not the case with me on different websites in past 3 weeks... How many people have witnessed the traffic difference ever since the pandemic started or from start of the month of March..? Share your thoughts.
Search Behavior | | asifseo0981 -
Dark Traffic & Long URLs - Clarification
Hi everyone, I've been reading the 2017 report by Groupon and the 2017 article by Neil Patel r.e. dark traffic. Both of these articles work on the assumption that most long URLs are not direct traffic because people wouldn't type a long URL into their browser. However, what happens to me personally all the time is that I start typing a URL into the browser, and the browser brings up a list of pages I've visited recently, and I click on some super long URL that I didn't bookmark but have visited in the past. That is legitimate direct traffic, but it's a long URL. I'm just wondering if there's something flawed in my reasoning or in the reasoning of Patel and Groupon. Maybe most people aren't relying on browsers like I am, or maybe things have changed a lot in the past 3 years. What do you think? And are there any more recent resources/articles that you would recommend r.e. trying to parse out dark traffic? https://neilpatel.com/blog/dark-traffic-stealing-data/ Thanks!
Search Behavior | | LivDetrick0 -
Diganosing Traffic Drop
With Spring Break and seasonality in play right now I'm curious about techniques for separating/diagnosing temporary drops in interest due to user behavior in a category from other things like drop in ranking or similar. How quickly can you tell these apart? Analytics will be delayed a few days for instance, other tools take time to update. What should we be looking for and when to say "ok, this too shall pass" as opposed to "did we make a bad site update" or something similar. Any tips?
Search Behavior | | GLStephenJ0 -
Content marketing where articles aren't high traffic
Hello, If no one is writing articles in your niche and articles are very scarce in the top 100 landing pages, what does that tell you about content and content marketing in your niche
Search Behavior | | BobGW0 -
Surge in Yahoo! organic traffic?
Recently a domain I manage shot up in rankings for many industry related keywords in Yahoo! It only lasted for two days, but durring that time we saw about 300% increase in organic traffic. Durring that time we were spending a lot of money in paid ads. Can anyone explain the sudden surge in Yahoo! organic traffic and rankings? Could there have been traffic from our paid ads that tracked to organic search? We use Google analytics and an in-house tracking system that both showed the same trends.
Search Behavior | | SEOBodybuilder0 -
A strange issue
We developed this website www.stevenprigge.com When you search for STEVEN PRIGGE in google, the first listing you get is for www.stevenprigge.com, but when you click on it it takes you to some other website. Can somebody tell me why is this happening?
Search Behavior | | KS__0 -
What is Responsible for All My "Direct" Traffic?
We have a broad content site - the majority of our traffic overall comes in via deep links.Google analytics consistently shows 17-20% of daily traffic under the "direct" bucket, with the rest of the traffic about equally split between Referring sites and Organic search.However, if we look at the specific content in the "direct" bucket, the URLs that are being hit do tend to mirror rather closely the Search traffic. The close mapping to our Search traffic doesn't seem to make much sense - while some of it is probably bookmarks, it seems doubtful that that could be responsible for more than, say, 20% of this direct traffici based on the # of pages and types of pages (many of the pages that do well in search are honestly not ones that someone would be likely to bookmark). The traffic reported by google as "direct" for a given day tracks a lot closer to Search than Referral URLs (which tend to be he more viral content on our site). Any idea what could be causing this traffic to show as Direct? Do people tend to bookmark pages while doing searches to come back to them or something? THANKS everyone for the responses. Still not quite sure what it is, continuing to look into it, particularly technical issues that the link to the Avinash post might prove very helpful for
Search Behavior | | BG19850 -
What is your traffic mix?
Read Rand's post on the blog about diversity in traffic source http://www.seomoz.org/blog/traffic-source-diversity-is-essential-for-successful-seo. I would be very interested to know from mozzers, how their experience has been with traffic share. While you answer, please be kind enough to share the following: 1. The niche of the website you wish to quote in your answer. 2. The means of promotion you use (SEO, Social Media, PPC, Display, Affiliate) 3. The reason you think you cited this example and do you think it has been a success or a failure or somewhere in the middle? Appreciate your time, thanks.
Search Behavior | | saibose0