Direct traffic is up 2100% (due to a bot/crawler I believe)
-
Hi,
The direct traffic to website www.webgain.dk has increased by over 2100% recently. I can see that most of it is from US (my target audience is in Denmark and the website is in danish).
What can I do about this? All this traffic gives my website a bounce rate of 99.91% for direct traffic. I believe it is some sort of bot/crawler. -
Already done. They also included the tip in their newsletter for beta-testers.
-
You might want to let them know about this, so they can add in documentation so future users know what is up before panicking.
-
Follow up: I have fixed this now. It was a monitoring tool by Digicure, where I have signed up to be a beta tester. Their platform checks the website like a normal visitor from servers around the world (in my test case it is Denmark and California) and thereby it looked like normal direct traffic in my data. I excluded their stated server IP-addresses in my Google Analytics filters and that helped. Thanks again guys for the help.
-
Thank you for all your great advice. I will follow them and see how it works.
-
If you are running Wordpress also check what page / pages are being accessed. I have had bots nail my wp-login like that before. If that is the case harden your installation, one thing I have found that stopped it was setting a deny in the htaccess on wp-login / wp-admin.
-
I was having the same problem ( for me it seemed to be Bings ads bot) . I used this guide below and it seems to filter out most of the bot visits.
-
I would check the service providers first just to know for sure they're all coming from the same provider. You can check this by visiting your Audience > Technology > Network report on the left side of your Google Analytics. If you see the same network and browsers being used I would use a filter (only if you're really determined/ 100% sure that it's bot traffic) to get them completely out of your Google Analytics view.
-
It's weird that the bot is accepting cookies, but with a bounce rate that high, I agree it's probably something automated (though it could be people who were looking for something else or were directed there by an email or an app accidentally). You can look through your logs to see IP addresses and then do as Atakala says and block the traffic if you're worried about bandwidth. You can also just filter it out in GA by excluding US traffic (if your'e worried about analytics being messed up).
-
It's probably AWS, which is amazon buyable crawl service.
If ıt costs you too much then try to ban it.
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
-
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - Subfolders Question
Hello all, I wonder if you can help me... I have a question about subfolders in multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO - more specifically in reference to targeting the UK and the US. Having looked at some global websites these are the types of implementations I've most commonly seen: UK subfolders .com/uk .com/gb .com/gb/en-gb | .com/en-GB .com/gb-en .com/en-gb .com/uk/en US subfolders .com/us .com/us/en-us | .com/en-US .com/us-en .com/en-us .com/us/en Are any of these approaches better than others or is it all a matter of personal preference? What's the reason for using .com/gb over .com/uk (or vice versa) for example? Secondly, my assumption is that the examples above which include language subfolders do so because these companies are targeting different speaking users within these countries. Would I be right to think that since the organisation I work for is only targeting the American speakers in the US, we wouldn't need to go so far as to have language subfolders in addition to location subfolders? Would be great to get some feedback / suggestions! Thanks!
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
/en-us/ Outranking Root Domain and other hreflang errors
I'm working with a new site that has a few regional sites in subdirectories /en-us/, /en-au/, etc and just noticed that some of our interior pages (ourdomain.com/en-us/interior-page1/ ) are outranking the equivalent ourdomain.com/interior-page1. This only occurs in some SERPS while others correctly display the non-regional result. I was told we have hreflang tags implemented correctly in the meta information of each of our pages but have yet to research deeply. Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Any help would be appreciated as I am a little lost. Cheers, Andrew
International SEO | | AndyMitty0 -
How do you get the "real" organic traffic from direct traffic?
Please check the following article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/study-shows-organic-search-responsible-64-web-traffic/111791/ I hope you guys have some ideas on how to extract the "real" organic traffic from direct. Thanks in advance!
International SEO | | zpm20140 -
Starting keyword research without a direct competitor to analyze
I work for a non-profit who has always had the luxury of being a monopoly when it comes to the service we provide. Without getting into the boring details, we have an international audience that needs to get certified through us to continue their educational pursuits in the US. Easy as it gets in terms of SEO. Now, we have a for-profit venture based on our existing verification services where we offer those same services for international organizations. After a lot of research, we haven't been able to find someone else out there similar enough to be considered a direct competitor - at least to the point where I could look at what they're optimizing for. My question is this: without a clear-cut competitor to identify and analyze, where should we start for keyword research? We think we know how people would find us, but analytics data for the better part of a year shows all traffic as brand-related. Fortunately, we have many long-standing relationships with international organizations, so obtaining links has come naturally after linking to the new venture from our home page, news, SM, etc. But as far as providing our editorial staff - who, up until now, had never been concerned with keywords - a place to start for keyword research so they can then employ a basic SEO checklist... where would you start?
International SEO | | c2g0 -
Why has there been Massive increase in traffic to my clients .eu site after redirects were initiated?
Hi guys, This is a strange one thats really bugging me. I have a client that redirected their domain to a brand new domain that was already live for the previous two months. I have been trying analyse the data however I can't quite understand why there is a massive increase in visitors from the United States when the old site was redirected. The redirection took place at the beginning of July. It was badly managed in terms of the mapping of 301 redirects however thats not the issue here. The level of traffic is gradually decreasing I imagine due to the high level of bounces. The site in question is an EU funded website for education. The old site in the first 2 weeks of June received around 500 visits from the USA while the new site in the first 2 weeks of July (2 weeks into the redirects) received around 3,000 visits from the USA. The new site had previously received only 300 visits for the same period as the old site in the 1st 2 weeks of June. Any idea why this might be? Thanks Rob
International SEO | | daracreative0 -
Redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO
Hi, I have two questions. Question 1: is it worthwhile to redirect the main site to keyword-rich subfolder / specific page for SEO? For example, my company's webpage is www.example.com. Would it make sense to redirect (301) the main site to address www.example.com/service-one-in-certain-city ? I am asking this as I have learned that it is important for SEO to have keywords in the URL, and I was thinking that we could do this and include the most important keywords to the subfolder / specific URL. What are the pros and cons of this? Should I create folders or pages just the sake of keywords? Question 2: Most companies have their main URL shown as www.example.com when you access their domain. However, some multi-language sites show e.g. www.example.com/en or www.example.com/en/main when you type the domain to your web browser to access the site. I understand that this is a common practice to use subdomains or folders to separate different language versions. My question is regarding subfolders. Is it better to have only the subfolder shown (www.example.com/en) or should I also include the specific page's URL after the subfolder with keywords (www.example.com/en/main or www.example.com/en/service-one-in-certain-city)? I don't really understand why some companies show only the subfolder of a specific language page and some the page's URL after the subfolder. Thanks in advance, Sam
International SEO | | Awaraman1 -
Romanian users searching english kw/info
Hi! My users would search for english keywords, for example: "my product review". How can I optimize my site for english searches? Should I post the content in romanian and the title in english? Things I've done so far: 1.Romanian tld 2. Ip from Romania 3. Links from romanian sites. What do you guys think? Thanks!
International SEO | | aleisterl0