Turkish Invasion? Massive influx of non-english traffic
-
Last month, a client of mine has had a very large increase in irrelevant traffic. This traffic is all being sent by Google from mostly eastern Europe, but also from Egypt and Brazil. The largest influx is from Turkey.
The traffic is all landing on only two URL's. The magnitude of this traffic is about 350 visits per day. The main keywords sending traffic are:
- müzik indirme programları (Turkish which translates to "music download programs")
- تحميل برنامج اوبرا (Arabic translates to "download Opera")
- program za skidanje muzike (Bosnian for "program for downloading music")
My client is a small nonprofit summer music festival (with a strong emphasis on Opera music) so some of the on-page at least relates to these keywords. But the site is entirely in English.
Since the words are related to a traditional sketchy vertical I'm worried that my client site has been hacked. Though, for the life of me, I can't imagine what anyone can gain from this.
My questions are:
Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
What are the potential ramifications of this irrelevant traffic? (I'm worried about the traffic slowing down the site, I'm also worried that 350 visits per day and a 95% bounce rate is going to hurt my clients reputation with search engines)
What can be done about it?
Thank you for any insight you can provide.
-
Hi Everett,
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer.
I think you are right that the main concern here is security. Great ideas on how to screen for this. There is no hacked message in the SERPs. I don't currently have access to the their GWT but will make it a priority. I did look at the source code in Google's cache and there is no sign of these terms. There is not a single instead of "download" which is a common characteristic to all these queries.
It could be just an algorithmic hiccup. The site does use some fancy characters to describe the Operas that they produce. One example is the "i" with grave accent in the Opera _Così Fan Tutte. _I suppose it is possible that with enough repetition of these types of characters Google may think the site has some relevant non-english content.
Thanks again for the thoughts. Hope everything is going well at seOverflow.
-
Hello Jesse,
I doubt 350 visits a day would slow down the site unless it is hosted on a shared server with a much-less-than-stellar hosting company. The high bounce rate on a few terms shouldn't affect rankings for the entire site, but would only affect those particular terms. If the bounce rate was that high on the majority of terms I'd be more concerned.
However, I do think you are correct to be suspicious of hacking. Have you tried looking at Google's cache of those pages, viewing the source of the cache, and searching for the phrases you are concerned with? Have you received any messages from Google either in the SERPs or in GWT related to the site being hacked?
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 traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?
One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month. The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate. I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics. However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam. Are there recommendations for filtering this out? Can I identify spam IP addresses?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Strange Traffic / Viewed content in Analytics
Hi Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views) How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ? Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ? Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ? All Best Dan ps - also many above average home page views
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0 -
GA stopped tracking traffic, suddenly, why¿? :-/
2 days ago GA stopped receiving data. It only stopped for one account of all my projects. At this moment there are 5 persons navigating the site and these days there where numerous visitors as they contacted the support team thru the site. GA says that it's receiving the code, hw, I checked it twice. The tracking code is located below the footer, in the body. It was there for few years.... I also checked if there is some js conflict, negative. Is there something that could make the tracking to stop? Does anybody experienced similar problems¿? Should I be worried...¿? (and with SEOmoz server with issues not sure when will see new results.......) EDIT: In Web Master Tools I see results for indexing, with yesterday date, so I assume that the site crawling is ok and must be GA issue.
Reporting & Analytics | | MilosMilcom0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0