Our organic homepage traffic just recently spiked from about a typical under 20 per weekend to about 820 -- what could be causing this?
-
Website: http://www.myinjuryattorney.com
Our homepage typically receives under 20 organic visitors per weekend, but I just checked traffic this morning, and it was at a whopping 821 for just Saturday and Sunday. It's already at 212 this morning.
I'm heavily assuming this is fake traffic as there were about 818 drop offs after visiting the homepage, an 84.41% bounce rate, and an average session duration of 5 seconds. Our typical metrics -- last weekend for example, were: 13 visitors to the homepage, 38% bounce, and an average session duration of 1 minute 26 seconds.
Does anyone know who or what could be causing this? Could it be a competitor using negative SEO of some sort? Thank you in advance.
-
Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you.
1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions?
2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients. -
-
Hi Brett - I was able to go into this filter and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
-
Hi Rick,
Since I haven't seen a response yet, I'm assuming I wasn't clear enough in my explanation so I went into an unfiltered view for one of my clients and found some ghost spam, then skitched it so you could see how to get there and examine it yourself on your website. Hope this helps!
-
Not just yet. Click on the secondary dimension drop down bar and type in hostname, or find it under the behavior bar. You can also look at just google traffic by clicking on Google first then setting the hostname as the secondary dimension. It should become apparent at that point if you have a lot of bots spoofing your traffic with a fake source.
-
Hi Brett - thank you! Do I have this set up right? I'm just seeing normal sources from what I can tell. https://www.screencast.com/t/t9VW5tSz
-
Yes, because this filter is based on the hostname. If a bot is spoofing the source but does not have a valid hostname (and most will not) then it will be filtered out by the include filter. Go into your GA data, go down to the source/medium report under acquisitions and set the secondary dimension to hostname.
If you're seeing something like (not set) next to Google/Organic traffic in the source then that's spam. I've got some in my unfiltered views as well. From the article I sent you:
"On the other hand, valid traffic will always use a real hostname. In most of the cases, this will be the domain. But it also can also result from paid services, translation services, or any other place where you've inserted GA tracking code."
So just make sure you compile a list of all the valid hostnames for your website and you should be fine.
-
Hi Brett,
Thank you for the info. Would all of this still apply if the traffic is considered organic and not referral?
-
Hi Rick,
Try checking your traffic against the secondary dimension "hostname". If a large number appear to be invalid hostnames then you've got yourself an answer. Referral traffic, also known as ghost spam, can be removed with an include filter. Moz wrote a great guide on how to do this here: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
If you're at all concerned that the traffic could be ghost spam and you don't have this filter in place, then an easy means of checking is to implement the filter on a test view and see how it impacts your data. Just make sure you create a new view to test it on first, because I had a client accidentally exclude all of his valid hostnames and lost every last bit of actionable data.
Hope this helps!
-
Have you checked the landing pages that relate to the keywords? In that case you would hopefully be able to see what kind of pages are trending at the moment and increasing your traffic. A big increase in traffic might have an influence, but in the end 800 searches more daily are not that much.
-
I noticed a few months ago, that type of traffic was not just showing up under referral but also under organic in GA. As far as i am concerned, just another problem plaguing GA/GWMT.
Matt
-
Hi Martijn,
I'm checking now and for some reason it's not reflecting the high # of visitors. All of the queries also seem normal, and it's showing that none have been repeated over 5 times. There are however a ton of different, but pretty normal ones appearing. Any additional insight given that info? Thanks!!
-
Hi Matt, thanks for the quick answer! All of this traffic is actually showing up under our organic rather than referral
-
Sounds like you are experiencing "Referral Spam". Have you checked the sources in Google Analytics? It is essentially a spammy way of advertising domains and services.
Here are a few links to help you understand and fix the issue:
- https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
- If you have GA: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en
Good Luck,
Matt
-
Hi Rick,
If you connected Google Search Console to your site you should be able to see in the Search Analytics data what kind of keywords did trigger the traffic. It could always be fake traffic but sometimes you just get lucky with certain keywords that you appear to rank for all of a sudden.
Martijn.
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 to Increase US traffic for other GEO based website
Can you help me to understand why my traffic from the US is not increasing for landing pages/product pages whereas for our blog it has grown 2X to 3X past 2 quarters? I am afraid that I don't get any right answer for this. Could you or someone help me to discover the answer? Also, what should I do to rank in the US for a particular KW, we rank on 2 positions for KW "Hackathon" in India but for the US the no is 56. I don't understand what to do and the best possible way to rank in the US.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rajnish_HE0 -
We've just completed a company video. Should we post it everywhere at once, or stagger on various channels (YouTube, website, LinkedIn, Facebook...)
Hopefully we'll get a lot of traffic from our new corporate video. If we post it everywhere at once, will we get a spike in our analytics, and if so, will it be seen by Google as an anomaly, or even suspicious. If we spread out the distribution over several channels over a little time, should we get a longer bump. In either instance, we may consider a sharing schedule to promote it over time.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveMauldin0 -
Recent 2017 Disavow Experience - How long is it taking?
Hello All A client's site recently got hit with links from an XXX neighborhood. My clients site is on the periphery of adult entertainment, think Maxim Magazine, but not in the porn space. These links could be natural, or pushed by a competitor, we definitely did not solicit them. Regardless, dozens of links were established and then found by Google starting in February and a few very important keyword rankings disappeared about 2 months later (after Google found more and more XXX links). The linked to page is the only one that was really hit and it's not a manual action - seems completely algorithmic. We have disavowed all that we can put our finger on but I'm trying to provide guidance as to how long it has taken others to see some type of recovery...?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoaustin0 -
HOW!??! Homepage Ranking Dropped Completely out of Top 100 on Google....
So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
Wordpress Category Archives - Index - but will this cause duplication?
Okay something I am struggling with Using YOAST - but have a recipe blog - However the category archives have /are being optimized and indexed as I am adding custom content to them , then listing the recipes below. My question is if I am indexing the Category Archives and using these to add custom content above - then allows the recipe excerpts from the category to be listed underneath - will these recipe excerpts be picked up as duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kelly33300 -
Should I 301 redirect my old site are just add a link to my new site
I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tyrell0 -
Can links from an old site raise DA for other site? Or just unethical?
So this may be an odd question. So a competing company went out of business. Their domain name is now available. So just for research purposes, would you ever or would it be unethical for a person to buy an expired competing domain name, and point it to another site to collect their link juice? The site was only a DA of 10, but not sure if one - its bad to buy a competing companies expired domain - and two - even though in the same industry, this would be bad to point it to another site or create a site from it. Just curious your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | asbchris0