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.
Organic Traffic From...Mountain View, CA?
-
I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately. Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA. There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around. I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately. This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst. In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
-
I'm guessing it may just be a new bot. Looking at the old data, we did get some similar organic traffic from Mountain View in the past - it was just a visit or two a month as opposed to the recent spikes.
-
started seeing Mountain View, CA here as well - as of a few days ago.
-
We used a trial of Hubspot several months back and I saw a fair amount of traffic from Mountain View that did not show up in our GA account. Chalked it up to crawlers on the site. Don't know if that helps you at all, but you're not alone!
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
-
Organic traffic down
My 15 or so clients have all seen a drop in organic traffic by about 20% on GA4 for April. Rankings have not dropped or anything like that - so just wondering if anyone else has had similar?
Reporting & Analytics | | Contentcoms2 -
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 -
Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?
One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month. The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate. I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics. However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam. Are there recommendations for filtering this out? Can I identify spam IP addresses?
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | | joony0 -
Referral Traffic from Google
Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this. I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496. I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change. I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help! Thank you, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | RASEO1 -
Senuke and traffic generator program is a good idea?? I think i got some problems now.
First of all thanks for reading, especially if you are the one whose bright ideas will help me out:) I started using senuke xcr about 3 months ago, obviously at the beginning i didnt make much success(not like I do now). Later i bought that inferno thingy and it actually works. First 2 weeks didnt make much difference(although i could see some little but stable uprising) but after 4th week ended, the average impression and queries doubled up, 6th went up again, its like every week or two it jumps up and keeps it there. Also the actual traffic from keywords went up! When about the second week finished, i started using a traffic generator program, first it leveled out the impressions and seemed to help a bit. Lately i think it messed it all up, plus about 2 weeks ago there was 2-3 dayswhen i sent a bit more traffic than usual and around that time the average rising of impressions didnt happened, it might even went down. Now i stopped using traffic g. and everything stayed the same no improvement!! Anyone could help me? I need to get it moving up again! Also im still nowhere near the top as the keywords are competitive well at least for me. What do i do wrong and what should i do? Also what about traffic generator? ps is it safe or/and or allowed to write that? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Sugafree0 -
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 -
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