Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic
-
Hi there I am really hoping someone can help.
The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'.
The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats.
Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
George
-
Hey George,
As you say, Google shouldn't be inferring ranking adaptations from your data, for your site (within your Google Analytics profile). If they use any data in that kind of way, it would probably be from Search Console (which is actually Google's data, from their side)
If you can identify that it certainly is bot traffic, then it's unlikely that Google would move on it at all. They're very good at detecting fake traffic. Back in the day 'click-farms' used to be a thing, hundreds of people in third world countries (or a robot) clicking Google search results to try and increase CTR. If they've taken measures to filter that out (which they have) then 'dumb' bot traffic shouldn't impact you much
That being said, if all the bot traffic slows your site down a lot and then causes real users to react negatively to their browsing experience, that could be something which Google might pin you on
Your main thing to do is to really identify the traffic and what network domain it's coming from. If it looks obviously 'bot-like' then you can take measures to block requests from that area of the web. Be careful though, it might be a legitimate crawler, even Rodgerbot (the Moz crawler!)
See if you can pin the traffic to a network domain in GA, and then an IP-range in something like AWStats or server-log based analysis software. If you can say, yeah that IP range is probably that network domain and my vague idea of what it is, is X - then you'll be in a much better (more informed) place to proceed
-
Hi Effect Digital,
Wow, you are a star! Thank you so much for your help.
That article is great. I seem to have fallen into a trap a lot of us fall into in assuming that bounce rate is a kind of instant drop off statistic. Knowing that it is measuring the percentage of single engagement use hugely changes things! But that said the dwell time from this fake traffic is poor.
As the nature of the traffic is 'direct' rather than coming from google or any other engine does this then matter? Now as I know about the bounce rate vs pogo sticking debate I can't see that google will see this traffic as much of an issue? If Google isn't reading my analytics data I can't see how this now matters other than polluting the analytics data?
I was struggling to even find a name for it so having that helps a lot too!
Thanks,
George
-
First of all, most people believe that metrics from Google Analytics (including bounce rate) do not affect your ranking results or SEO intake. Here's a post on the subject: https://conversionxl.com/guides/bounce-rate/seo-impact/
There's no need to let anyone know, the only reason to tackle this is:
a) it's polluting your analytics data and ruining your insights
b) you're at constant risk of DDoS
If you don't care about either of those things then, it really doesn't matter at all
If you want to take better steps to identify this mystery traffic
- https://d.pr/i/hzBJTg.png (GA screenshot)
- https://d.pr/i/BmNK6n.png (GA screenshot)
- https://d.pr/i/Xryszu.png (GA screenshot)
I find these 3 steps in Analytics to be a pretty effective starting point
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
-
Large traffic loss, how to resolve?
So I have a few questions. A site which has dropped quite dramatically over the last month. There could be a few factors (less regular updates) been one. However, plenty of links spam has happened which some of which appears to be been pointed at an article. That article has been removed. We also disavowed 800+ links all of which had a spam score of between 100 and 40+ - they all looked ugly and irreverent such as forum spams, wallpapers spams, and junk. Is this the right move to make? What should the site do next? The current score is 4,000 SEMR. It was around 15,000 before. It's an aged site. Less effort is put into it now as the next site is here. Await your replys thanks. 3BCQNi3
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thewebpreneur0 -
Dodgy links across top ranking sites in a certain industry - Could this be negative link building?
Hi, I've noticed repeated low value / high spam backlinks directing to a site that I manage, and despite disavowing, new links showing similar anchor text keep appearing. See sample in the table below: <colgroup><col width="514"> <col width="407"> <col width="364"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Alexanders
| biz.mfso.info/files/images/vertical-blinds-for-bifold-doors.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers vertical blinds for bifold doors |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/install-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers install vertical blinds |
| nmr.mfso.info/files/images/cutting-vertical-blinds.html | | Get free high quality HD wallpapers cutting vertical blinds |
| rre.uere.info/files/images/high-quality-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers high quality vertical blinds rre.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers high quality vertical blinds |
| dig.uere.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds dig.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| dig.uere.info/files/images/mould-on-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds dig.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers mould on vertical blinds |
| hja.uere.info/files/images/cost-vertical-blinds.html | HD wallpapers cost vertical blinds hja.uere.info | Get free high quality HD wallpapers cost vertical blinds | I also looked across 5 high ranking sites in the same industry and noticed they too have these 'dodgy' links in their backlink profiles. Could this be negative link building? If so, does anyone know a way to trace it or get it stop?0 -
Looking for service like one load
Hi,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | corn2015
I used to utilize the One Load service and noticed that it no longer exists. Can you please make some recommendations on video marketing platforms that are similar?0 -
We lost 60-70% of our organic traffic but no penalty - what happened?
Hi Mozzers! Need some help/advice I’m running a sports betting site – superbetting.com and around 16-19<sup>th</sup> may our organic traffic suddenly dropped with 60-70% or so and ever since we’ve been struggling trying to find the cause and not least, been trying to do something about. A few observations / thoughts; It seems we’ve suddenly have quite a few inbound links from Russia without promoting our content / site towards Russian users. Neither do we have any Russian content. Should we disavow those links and/or try to contact the sites to get our link removed? Looking in ahrefs, I can see that anchors also suddenly are dominated by Russian. Maybe obvious given the above but still strange … We have struggled with spammers trying to deploy link in our forum and have just recently removed them ( or at least we think we have) but could those bad links been hurting us over time? Google ran an algo update in may regarding “quality signals” and I full aware that our site may not be top-notch but I can’t belief that should have hit us that hard since I (and I may be biased :)) would say that there are far lousier sites ranking better than us now than before. Any feedback would be appreciated Thanks! Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skjorte19740 -
70% organic traffic drop in October?! Algorithm change?
I oversee content for a client and this past month there was a 70% decrease in traffic. We noticed the hit start on September 29th, and has never rebounded. Any suggestions what this could be (i..e latest Google algorithm update) and or tools I should use to look into it? Nothing is showing up as an alert on Moz analytics and need to address with my client asap.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Overall traffic increasing but specific short tailed keywords decreasing any ideas?
Something very strange has happened regarding my website traffic when making a comparison to the first six months of 2012 and then 2014. Anybody got any ideas? From my Google analytics from 1 January 2014 to 1 July in other words six months my total traffic on my website was 30,209. Not provided source ( what does this mean ? ) was very high at 23,141 but two of the my main short tail keywords I've targeted in the past "Whitby holiday cottages “only equal 254 and "Whitby cottages" was only 176. When I made a comparison with the same time period below in 2012 the website traffic this year as gone up greatly by almost 20000, but the two of my money short tail keywords as gone down greatly! If I compare the same time frame for 2012 the overall traffic was only 13,380. Not provided source was nowhere near as high at only 1836 which is also much less than above in 2014 but the short tail keywords I targeted "Whitby holiday cottages was almost 10 times higher at 2005 and "Whitby cottages “much higher at 613. I ran the questionnaire on http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/quiz/ regarding Panda and particularly Penguin and its association with back links. The article says that Penguin didn't hit the overall keywords, but only specific ones if they been targeted on the following dates the time points of April 24, 2012 and May 25, 2012 which are known Penguin rollout dates. So when I checked the two short tail keywords above for those two dates the figures did seem to drop from 10 hits a day to 5 but then went back up immediately to approximately 10 hits a day during the two-month period which suggested to me that I'd not been hit by Penguin on those dates. So when you look at the comparison the first six months of 2012 and then 2014 there is no doubt that money short tail keywords of dropped off dramatically for me but the overall website traffic has gone up dramatically. Some of the increase in traffic will be down to time and more articles/pages etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WhitbyHolidayCottages
The two short tail keywords I mention above I know I've dropped in Google rankings I used to be position three page one and the site is now position 10 so I would assume that's why I've dropped in traffic for those phrases.
Has anybody got any idea what's happened? I can honestly say that I've not noticed it in bookings on the website business seems about the same overall.0 -
Dealing with internal pages with bad backlinks - is this approach OK?
Hi all, I've just been going through every page of my company website, and found a couple of internal pages with nasty backlinks/profiles. There are a significant number of article marketing and rubbish directory pages pointing to these internal pages. These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs. I was planning to: (1) change URLs - removing current (soon to be former) URLs from Google via Webmaster Tools. Then (2) remove website's 404 for a while so nasty links aren't coming anywhere near the website (hopefully nasty links will fail to find website and broken links will result in link removal - that's my thinking anyway). PS. I am not planning to implement any kind of redirect from the old URLs. Does this sound like a sensible approach, or may there be problems with it? Thanks in advance, Luke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?
Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ayetti0