Why has our site had a huge spike in referral traffic?

[chuck-layton]

Starting last week, our site had a HUGE spike in referral traffic from: search.dnsassist.verizon.net.

We have never had a visit from there until last week, and had 12K visits last week so something is happening. The traffic does look normal though, all visits were in the US from 700 cities and pages/visit, avg visit duration and bounce rate are close to site average.

There is a few other referral sites that showed up last week as well: wind.search-help.net,  uslc.search-help.net, finder.cox.net. All of these sites are low, around 30 to 50 visits a day, but we had not any referrals until last week.

I did notice most of these sites state "Explore with Yahoo Search."

Just wondering if anyone has every seen this before and wondering what is happening. Thanks for reading.

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[Everett]

This sounds like Verizon's "Search Assist" page, which is shown to Verizon users when they miss-type a URL or try to access a domain that doesn't exist. How this happened to spike is anyone's guess. Here are two likely possibilities...

1. The browser hijack mentioned by Mike Roberts above could be trying to send Verizon users to a domain that doesn't exist, but is similar to yours (e.g. yourdomain.com and yourdomain.info) so when their browser tries to access the domain Verizon redirects them to their "Search Assist" page with similar results, including yours.

2. A company similar to yours, or perhaps even your own, could have been featured on a television show (e.g. Good Morning America) with a large viewing audience that isn't super web-savvy. Instead of typing YourBrandDomain.com into the URL bar they might think of it as a search bar and type "Your Brand" instead, resulting in the redirect to Verizon's "Search Assist" page of search results, which lists your domain as one of the results.

[BrianJGomez]

I've noticed with my ISP (time warner cable), when I type a URL that doesn't exist, it will route me to it's own SERP that has a list of businesses that are quasi relevant to the URL i typed in. Could this be happening for you?

[CustomButtonCo.com]

Are you doing any type of PPC? That can cause some issues with there content network ads.

[MikeRoberts]

Cursory inspections shows that:

search.dnsassist.verizon.net is Verizon Wireless.... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/verizon-substituting-its-own-search-engine-overriding-its-own-users-search-engine-preferences/

wind.search-help.net is search being done over the Windstream Communications broadband.

uslc.search-help.net is caused by a browser hijack.

And, finder.cox.net appears to also possibly be a browser hijack.