Strange traffic.
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We are a norwegian bakeshop (sykkelkompaniet.no) and we have started getting a lot of direct traffic from Miami and Chico. Wondering why, and suspect that someone is trying to hack our system. Any suggestions?
We have never been in Chico or in Miami... and we don't spend anything on marketing so far, furthermore we don't ship to the US. The traffic is about 800 unique hits a day.
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Hi,
Can you grab the IP addresses of the visits, e.g. from server logs? It could be automated scraping - Googling some of the IPs will shed some light on that if that is the case, as folks will have posted about this on other forums and cited some of the IPs. If it's a scraper, it might identify itself via an ISP name as well, e.g. when Facebook crawls a page, it IDs itself and the crawl usually comes from Palo Alto or Menlo Park, California.
Coming from solely Miami and Chicago sounds suspicious or at least like automation - if this was natural US traffic, you would expect more geographical diversity, even if there was something that particularly interested people in those towns about your site.
Andy is 100% right about images too, at which point you can move the images to another file location.
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A common one here is to look at the images on your site and make sure no-one is referencing them on their own site. This can increase hits to a site.
Does going through Google Analytics throw up any suggestions?
-Andy
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