Direct Traffic Spike

[SteveZero12]

In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?

[SteveZero12]

The re-directs may have been the issue...will report back when I can see a trend. Thanks for the help!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Steve

Direct traffic which 404's should not trigger any sort of hit. They could be coming from a variety of places: old links, bookmarks, browser history, emails, social shares etc. Your best bet if you want to retain any traffic value there is to 301 them to relevant pages if possible.

-Dan

[SteveZero12]

That may have helped. We changed some of the page names to more relevant and descriptive pagenames. Alot of our landing pages are 404 when I look at the Direct Traffic now. Would that trigger a Direct Traffic hit somehow? Those should still be referrals from old links...right? Even then, the 404 direct hits don't make up for the difference. Direct traffic for the homepage is up significantly too.

[evolvingSEO]

In addition to some of the other suggestions, I would suggest segmenting your traffic even more. Is there any other common denominator? Mobile vs Desktop? Certain landing pages? Location? etc...

Also, it's not a typical looking glitch, which shoots straight up and stays there, the direct traffic takes some dips etc - what's happening there? Can you segment anything about the direct traffic during those dips etc?

-Dan

[SteveZero12]

Is this consistent with scrapers and feed grabbers? I launched the site in mid february. The direct traffic didn't really kick in until a month or two after. The previous site was a straight .HTML site that I built. The new one is a WordPress site.

http://www.screencast.com/t/ETME6FbDhvz

I would like to think that the traffic is good. But if it is effecting the security or organic traffic in any way, I need to fix it. My organic traffic started to sink after the WordPress switch as well.

http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[brad.s.knutson]

Egol,

In my experience, scrapers and feedgrabbers are usually server-side scripts that won't register in Google Analytics because they won't have Javascript enabled.

Of course - the server logs will definitely show scrapers.

[LesleyPaone]

EGOL has a good point about the scrapers.

One thing I would like to mention about Wordpress is to pay attention to your spikes. Below is a link to my personal sites stats.

http://screencast.com/t/eJ6pFjg2BkFj

Now, I am going to show you the daily for july.

http://screencast.com/t/neiHXyj6ck

Now, here is the break down where you can see the most requested page.

http://screencast.com/t/pMT1tKpJOpO

Look how the numbers are skewed. I only change content on this site like 2 times a month. But the second most requested page is the admin page. I have noticed here lately that there are some new bots running and they are nailing the admin pages of WP.

With WP being the most used platform on the internet, it is like Windows when it comes to people looking for exploits to it. I would suggest using a Wordpress security plugin. I cannot really recommend any, I haven't used one myself. What I tend to do is just disable the login by renaming the file with an extension of .php_ then it will 404 all requests. This can be a viable option if you manage the sites totally and do not have clients that want to login to them, like in my case. If not I would look for a WP security plugin recommendation.

[EGOL]

Scrapers and feedgrabbers.