Recent large spike in traffic from same location?
-
Since May 21st our site is showing via Google Analytics a large spike in traffic to our home page. The traffic increase is 4-5 times our average. I was able to track the source to the same town we are headquartered. We have lost 4 spots for our top keyword. We went from 7 to 11 in Google in this time period. I understand it could be related to Penguin. But I also suspect this issue is negatively effecting ranking by increasing bounce rate and decreasing pages per visit and time on site.
Before/After May 21st
Returning Visitors: 52% / 23%
New Visitors: 48% / 77%
Pages per Visit: 12.4 / 5.44
Duration of visit Avg: 10.23 / 4.22
I would greatly appreciate any ideas on the cause of this issue. Also any input on the above metrics and sudden lost in a couple spots in SERP.
Thanks.
-
Google has says that they do not use GA for rankings or for search quality. Here's a video from Matt Cutts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU.
-
We did find that the IP's hitting the home page for a second were coming from our IP block. I am going to set up a filter in GA. My concern becomes Google's use of user metrics like dwell time. If I block on GA will that still hurt my user metrics in the eyes of search engine rankings. Is Google looking at my GA with filters or are they looking at raw data which would still include the false visits from our server?
-
As I understood, all the visits are direct to his home page. From the data he wrote it seems that a person is deleting all his history every time before visiting the website.
Before/After May 21st
Returning Visitors: 52% / 23% / New Visitors: 48% / 77% (more new visitors - or more of the same visitor deleting his cookies))
Pages per Visit: 12.4 / 5.44 (an increase of single page visits would lead to a sitewide decrease in pages per visit) Duration of visit Avg: 10.23 / 4.22 (decreasing the average visit duration with 6.01 minutes could mean the visits are extremely fast). Maybe I am wrong, but it could be an automated tool - what do you think @Keri Morgret?
@Devon - you should check also if GA is installed properly. The Asynchronous code must be before the ending tag of the head section - so before and before any other javascript. So just make sure your GA tracking code is the last code in the head section of your website.
-
Are they all one page per visit? Are they all visiting a different page each time?
It's been several years, but I had something like this happen to me. Had 50+ visits all coming from the same city, all direct traffic, all with a single page per visit. I happened to have another analytics package on the site at the time, and saw that it was the same IP and actually one user visiting 50+ pages. For some reason, GA though they were different people.
If you look at some of the technology reports in GA, you might look to see if they have the exact same browser resolution, flash version, etc. That may help indicate if it's actually one computer that has some settings that are making GA think it is separate visits.
-
You can block the IP once you identify it - both from visiting your website and from Analytics tracking if you want, but I wouldn't worry too much. Besides inflating your data in GA, it can't have a negative impact on your website. If the problem continues just analyze your visitors experience at traffic level - organic, referrals and social. Did you exclude your own Ip from Ga tracking?
-
It is a well known network in our area. Cox communications.
-
Is the Network branded - for example from a company? Check the name of the network and if it's not a well known internet provider and it's a name from a company instead it means someone from that company keeps visiting your website (either manually or using a tool) - and you can get in touch with them - see if it's a competitor, etc
-
Thanks for the response.
It is Direct traffic coming from the same network. It also looks like it is using Chrome as the browser.
-
Did you also check to see if the visits come from the same network? Are all of those visits direct, organic or referral? since you said they were all to your home page. Only user behavior from organic traffic can affect your rankings and since you lost only 4 spots, it's not the Penguin update. In case the traffic is organic, check the keyword report to see which keywords started to bring you more traffic - maybe you actually rank better for those.
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 -
Main Website Redirects to Mobile Website, Mobile Website counts this as direct traffic, is there a way to tell what the source/medium is?
Hello, The situation is that someone is arriving on my main website https://www.example.com and being redirected to http://m.example.com. When this happens my analytics says that the traffic is all direct coming to my mobile site. However, I know people clicking on my google cpc, and some google organic users are hitting the main website and being redirected. Before we didn't have as good of a redirect on our main website so I could tell organic and cpc traffic coming in, now my main website has a huge drop in these categories because they are redirecting to mobile but I can't tell on my mobile how much traffic from each is going to the mobile site. Is there a way to fix this? Is it because my main website is https:// and mobile is a http:// (as I know that sometimes makes traffic direct) or is it a bigger problem that can't be resolved? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | oxfordseminars0 -
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Analytics not tracking traffic from Old Domain Redirect
We've recently 301 redirected one of our client's domains to their new website and the strange thing is, we aren't seeing an increase in traffic in analytics. You would expect the traffic to increase roughly by the traffic volume from the old domain. There were a few hundred redirects and we tested a large sample and the redirects have been implemented properly. Is there something that we did incorrectly in our implementation of the domain redirect? Or is there something else that we need to do in Analytics to properly track those redirects?
Reporting & Analytics | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Organic traffic vs. GWT data
Hi, how are you? I'm having a question becasue of an inconsistency between the data GWT gives and the one GA gives me. When I see the ammount of clics GWT tells me in february, it says 32850. When I go to Channels --> Organic Search, it says 51014. The difference is really big! Do you happen to know why this huge gap between data?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
Traffic Drop with no real explaination?
Hello Everyone, On one of my sites PokerOnaMac we experienced a 75% drop in traffic in about a week (since September 3rd). I took a look at GA and the penalties have been applied sitewide. I also checked my Google Webmaster Tools, and there are no messages regarding "unhealthy link structures." We have had other sites penalized by Penguin & Manual Removals, but they are recovering now. What is my best bet to find what is wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | BestOdds0 -
Exclude Traffic from India
i would like to exclude all traffic coming from India using Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. How do i go about it ? Will it be applied to future traffic also ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050