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.
Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA
-
We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics.
I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari).
Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!
-
Hi fishlizzer!
Did Peter's advice help? If so, please mark one or both of his responses as a "Good Answer."
-
Well - you can see on monday traffic from US, VA, Ashburn that spike in Monday.
Go in GA, site, Audience, Geo, Location, US, VA, Ashburn. Then add secondary dimension - Browser and later Browser version. And start looking for monday patterns. Once you see spike you need go back in your http web log and find full user agent.
For now there is one good news - if bot can be seen in GA then this mean that bot execute JS for sure. Because there are bots that can't execute JS but make "parasite" traffic. There are also bots that didn't visit your site but make "fake" visit only in GA too.
-
Any suggestions on how to identify bot user agent? I don't want to block something that should be indexing / crawling the site using the .htaccess file. But, I'd like to be able to filter it from Google Analytics.
-
The usual suspect is "Amazon Datacenter":
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/Since this datacenter is hosting many bots (Even Roger - MOZ bot was there!) you must identify bot user agent and see why this happens. Most bots follow robots.txt protocol so you can disable them scanning your site.
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
-
Any solution to low search traffic on weekend
Hi. all, https://www.babyment.com is content website. our search traffic always shows a dip on weekend (friday to sunday), anyone has idea why it is like this? and is there a solution to this? or this is a just normal? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | melvinwu0 -
Tracking 301 redirect traffic in Google Analytics
if I 301 redirect www.mywebsite.com to go to www.yourwebsite.com, how can I track the traffic in Google Analytics that is coming from mywebsite.com?? I don't think that's a referral traffic, is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO0 -
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 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 -
Will 301 redirects (Same Domain) show as referral traffic in Analytics?
For an eCommerce site we have 301'd legacy product pages to new product pages. Is all that traffic going to show up as referral traffic from our own domain in Google Analytics? If so, is there any way to preserve original source/medium info or will all the source/medium info be our own domain since there is a 301 redirect?
Reporting & Analytics | | bozzie3111 -
How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!
Reporting & Analytics | | BoomDialogue690 -
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 -
Will having a subdomain cause referral traffic from the domain name?
Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com. When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com. Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx0
