Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.

[EricFish]

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

[EricFish]

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

[SirMax]

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.

[RuthBurrReedy]

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.

[EricFish]

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

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Eric,

A few things to reassure you off the bat:

1. 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.
2. 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.

[max.favilli]

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.