Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
-
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
-
I'm guessing it may just be a new bot. Looking at the old data, we did get some similar organic traffic from Mountain View in the past - it was just a visit or two a month as opposed to the recent spikes.
-
started seeing Mountain View, CA here as well - as of a few days ago.
-
We used a trial of Hubspot several months back and I saw a fair amount of traffic from Mountain View that did not show up in our GA account. Chalked it up to crawlers on the site. Don't know if that helps you at all, but you're not alone!
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
-
Change Phone Number Based on Traffic Source + Ping URL for Call Tracking Number
Hi Everyone, Is there a tool that can change the phone number on a web page based on the visitor source (i.e., direct, organic, paid, etc.)? I'd like to implement a solution like this with different call tracking numbers based on the visitor source. We use the Google suite for our analytics (GA, GTM, Google Data Studio, Google Optimize is also an option as well). - Also, is there a good call tracking service that will ping a URL each time the phone number is called so that we can track these calls as events in GA? The majority of our visitors use a desktop PC and dial in the number on the screen rather than clicking (tapping) on it from a mobile device. Thanks, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyRCWRCM0 -
Will changing the property from http to https in Google Analytics affect main unfiltered view?
I set my client up with an unfiltered view in Google Analytics. This is the one with historical data going back for years, so I don't want to do anything that will affect this view. Recently, the website moved from HTTP to HTTPS. There's a setting for the property that will allow me to change the property name to https://EXAMPLE.com and change the default URL to https://EXAMPLE.com. Questions: 1. If I change the property name and the default URL, will this somehow affect my unfiltered view in a way that I'll lose historical data or data moving forward? 2. I have heard that changing the default URL to HTTPS will help me avoid a common problem others have experienced (where they lose the referrer in Google Analytics and a bunch of their sessions go to direct / other). Is this true?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P3 -
How to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view?
Hi, Need help on how to exclude traffic for a specific mobile device in Google Analytics view. I have been searching and the only information available is excluding IP address of internal traffic. Is there any way to exclude traffic through a mobile MAC address?
Reporting & Analytics | | Khadija_K0 -
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 -
Find Pages with 0 traffic
Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.
Reporting & Analytics | | driveawayholidays0 -
How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!
Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue690 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0