Strange Spike in Direct / None traffic

[Dave_Eddy]

Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source.

All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots.

I'm worried for a couple of reasons:

A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings?

B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports?

7kwsJnB

[KeriMorgret]

Dave, did you figure out what was causing the spike?

[KeriMorgret]

Agreed on looking in at the city/network. I've seen this before, and the cause was a website monitoring service we signed up for that was actually triggering javascript.

[Travis_Bailey]

I've seen something similar to this many times. It's not terribly likely that it will adversely affect your rankings. Though someone may be trying to test your site security.

You could possibly better zero in on the source by using a combination of city/network domain as a secondary dimension to the direct medium.

If you have multiple profiles, you could setup a filter based on what the secondary dimension insights yield - should the traffic continue.

However, a less permanent solution would be a custom report with an exclude for direct traffic from a certain city/region.

Edit: Second thought, if the traffic doesn't stop and starts negatively affecting site performance - you may be able to find the offending IP and block them.