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.
Abnormal Spike in Traffic- Ddos or what?
-
We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?
-
As you have looked at the traffic sources and they seem to be natural I would then look at what the visitors are doing on your site.
Is the bounce rate up considerably? Has the time per visit fallen dramatically?
If not, if the traffic seems to be coming from a natural spread of sources and the behaviour on the site of the visitors is normal then just be glad of the extra traffic.
-
That's the thing...after a drill down, everything seems very natural...the IP sources are varied, the traffic sources have propotionately increased and the mapping also shows an increase in traffic from diverse locations. Analytics does not seem to indicate a particular planned trend...though the spike in traffic still feels a bit odd!
-
That's the thing...after a drill down, everything seems very natural...the IP sources are varied, the traffic sources have propotionately increased and the mapping also shows an increase in traffic from diverse locations. Analytics does not seem to indicate a particular planned trend...though the spike in traffic still feels a bit odd!
-
Depending on your analytics package you should be able to look at information such as network and location of visitors and drill down into them to see if the traffic is coming from an unusual source. For example on a UK site I look after with a small local focus they have had a number of visits from Tawain via the Taiwanese Google site. This may give you some insights as to whether it seems to be a real bounce or something more sinister.
-
Have you looked into the server activity log ? You may check the referer, the IP used and more. If this is a well done DDoS your servers should be down. Check the traffic : does the increase is a direct traffic ? Does it comes from search results or referring sites ?
A DDoS has only one goal and will probably use a direct request. I doubt this is the case for your site.
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
-
GA4 account & property not showing in traffic property setup list.
Hi there, I've connected multiple client accounts to GA4 already, but three of our accounts that we have administrator rights to in GA4 are not showing up in our selectable accounts/properties list when logged in via Moz to add to the traffic settings area. Anyone else have this issue and find a fix?
Reporting & Analytics | | luminusagency0 -
Abnormally High Direct Traffic Volume
We have abnormally high amounts of direct traffic to our site. It's comprising over half of all web traffic while organic is second with considerably less. From there the volume decreases amongst other channels. I've never seen such a huge proportion of traffic being attributed the Direct. Does anyone know how to test this or see if there is an error in Google Analytics reporting?
Reporting & Analytics | | graceflack 01 -
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Kickboard2 -
We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?
One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics. We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics? Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
How does Google Maps/G+ traffic show up in Analytics?
Hi Moz Community, I've been trying to figure out how traffic from Google Maps (and G+) shows up in Google Analytics and am struggling to find a good answer online. If someone finds a business through Google Maps and then clicks on the website in the Maps listing, does that show up as a referral from Google Maps? Our site shows virtually zero traffic from Google Maps even though we have a number of listing. Two related questions: if someone clicks through to a G+ page from a Maps result and then visits our website from the G+ page, does that show up in Analytics as a referral from G+? Is traffic from Google Maps or G+ ALSO counted as organic traffic? (Would it be possible to accidentally double-count a visit as both organic and a referral from Maps/G+? Thanks everybody!
Reporting & Analytics | | JohnGroves0 -
Finding an Explanation for a Massive Spike in Organic Search Traffic
Hi, I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason. The organic search engine traffic had always been steady, but about two months ago, organic search traffic started rising slowly. I checked OSE & a few other tools, but couldn't find any massive source of gained links or other explanations - just the usual occasional blog post about the company. I got in touch with my friend to see if maybe they'd gone with a competitor or something else, but he also had no idea (and even if he wasn't being honest with me, we still should've been able to spot links or social metrics or something!) Then, yesterday, their organic search traffic just tripled. The crazy thing is, it's not from one keyword: Every search term, and (not provided) essentially went up 200-400%. And I have no freaking idea why. No large gain of links. No website editing. The only possible explanation I thought up is maybe one of their competitors got knocked out, but I doubt that would cause such a stratospheric rise. So figured I'd turn to y'all. Any ideas on what might be causing such wonderful results? Anyone have any good tips on figuring out why a website could all of a sudden be doing incredibly? Analytics chart is below for the curious, and thanks in advance for any ideas / tips! nQHrscw.png
Reporting & Analytics | | FlynnZaiger0 -
Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Reporting & Analytics | | CassisGroup
Any thoughts?0