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.
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
-
Hello,
I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me.
We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account.
The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm.2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site.
The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site.
If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you.
Thanks for your help.
Eric
-
Hi SirMax,
Thanks for your input. I appreciate it. We'll add Wordfence to our WordPress toolbox and see if that addresses the issue.
In response to previous posts, thanks to everyone for your input. We were able to apply some filters to remove the bogus bot traffic from the analytics and normalize the data, however, this did not actually resolve the issue and in my eyes is more of a BandAid fix. The evil crawlers are still there, we just can't see them.
Thanks again for all of your input.
Eric
-
Hostname filtering does not work any more. Unfortunately most of the spammers have adapted and are using your website as hostname.
For the WordPress I use Wordfence plugin( using paid version - not affiliated with them in any shape or form beyond paying for their services). In the advance blocking you can set limits on how fast and how many pages crawlers can request. You can also block by country or ip range. It can also show you live traffic with a lot of details ( a lot more then google analytic - more like server log ). It might not be the complete remedy but it can help.
-
I wish I had an answer for how to stop the bots from hitting your site at all - I don't think a good one exists, as any solutions that wouldn't also block real human traffic to your site are going to be easy for spam bots to get around. I think your best bet is just to do everything you can to keep your data as clean as possible.
-
Hi Ruth,
Thanks a bunch for taking the time to respond to my post. Great advice. This is reassuring on a number of levels, however, it doesn't address the underlying issue of how to stop these spam bots in the first place.
We've already started the process of filtering out some of this bogus data. We'll also be integrating some WordPress plugins to see if that helps. That said, if the spam bots are hitting Analytics directly, as opposed to the actual website, WP plugins won't do anything.
Anyway, I appreciate your input and advice. Thanks so much.
Eric
-
Hi Eric,
A few things to reassure you off the bat:
- For what it's worth, there is a huge, HUGE amount of crawler spam happening in the web today. Every site I work on is being hit hard with false referrals and direct visits. I know Google Analytics is working on a solution to better filter these visits out. So I wouldn't be too concerned that it is something a competitor is doing to your site, specifically - it's more likely that it's been caught up in the general wave of spam crawlers.
- It's important to note that when we talk about Google looking at bounce rate and dwell time as part of ranking your site, those numbers are specifically from clicks through from search - that's data that Google can get without using your private web analytics data as a ranking factor, which they've said repeatedly that they don't and won't do. So a bunch of direct visits with high bounce rates will NOT affect your rankings.
So, it's not dangerous, just annoying. On to how to get that data out of your reports:
- Make sure you're not filtering out spam referrers at a View level - this can cause those visits to incorrectly appear as direct traffic.
- You could set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out direct visits with visit times of, say, under 5 seconds. Some real traffic may get caught in that, but it will get the noise levels down.
- The best way to filter out spam bot traffic, in my opinion, is to set up hostname filtering. Here's a post on Megalytic on how to do that: https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam. Make sure you've also got an "Unfiltered Data" View so you'll still have historic raw data if you need it.
Hope that helps! Good luck.
-
Check webserver log files, or log visits (ip address, user agent, __utma, __utmz, possibly browser fingerprint, etc...)
Analyzing those you can easily find out if the traffic is from scraping bot or humans.
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
-
How important is Lighthouse page speed measurement?
Hi, Many experts cite the Lighthouse speed as an important factor for search ranking. It's confusing because several top sites have Lighthouse speed of 30-40, yet they rank well. Also, some sites that load quickly have a low Lighthouse speed score (when I test on mobile/desktop they load much quicker than stated by Lighthouse). When we look at other image rich sites (such as Airbnb, John Deere etc) the Lighthouse score can be 30-40. Our site https://www.equipmentradar.com/ loads quickly on Desktop and Mobile, but the Lighthouse score is similar to Airbnb and so forth. We have many photos similar to photo below, probably 30-40, many of which load async. Should we spend more time optimizing Lighthouse or is it ok? Are large images fine to load async? Thank you, Dave bg_05.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | erdev0 -
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period)
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics
Reporting & Analytics | | Julia_a1a1 -
No-indexed pages are still showing up as landing pages in Google Analytics
Hello, My website is a local job board. I de-indexed all of the job listing pages on my site (anything that starts with http://www.localwisejobs.com/job/). When I search site:localwisejobs.com/job/, nothing shows up. So I think that means the pages are not being indexed. When I look in Google Analytics at Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Landing Pages, none of the job listing pages show up. But when I look at Acquisition > Channels > Organic and then click Landing Page as the primary dimension, the /job pages show up in there. Why am I seeing this discrepency in Organic Landing pages? And why would the /job pages be showing up as landing pages even though they aren't indexed?
Reporting & Analytics | | mztobias0 -
Google Analytics Goal/Event/SOMETHING to show only Wordpress "Posts", not pages, etc
Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...
Reporting & Analytics | | 3DR0 -
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 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
How can I see what Google sees when it crawls my page?
In other words, how can see the text and what not it sees from start to finish on each page. I know there was a site, but I can't remember it.
Reporting & Analytics | | tiffany11030 -
Google Analytics: Difference Between Goal Conversions & Goal Completions
When using Google Analytics, what is the difference between total goal conversions and total goal completions? We have many goals set up in a lead generation environment. Therefore, the only element of conversion is submitted a lead and arriving on the "Thank You" page. THose thank you pages are tagged accordingly. When we run reports though, the number of "Total Goal Conversions" and "Total Goal Completions" never match up.
Reporting & Analytics | | eMagineSEO0