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
-
3 word brand name + SEO. Will I be losing out on organic searches with spaces?
Hello, Starting a new website and the company name has three words. We've made the decision for the brand guide that we will not have spaces when the name is included in copy. Are we going to have difficulties ranking for both instances? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jessicarechkemmer0 -
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 -
70% organic traffic drop in October?! Algorithm change?
I oversee content for a client and this past month there was a 70% decrease in traffic. We noticed the hit start on September 29th, and has never rebounded. Any suggestions what this could be (i..e latest Google algorithm update) and or tools I should use to look into it? Nothing is showing up as an alert on Moz analytics and need to address with my client asap.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Sudden Recent Drop in Impressions in GWT - WTF?
I noticed this recent drop in impressions in Google Webmaster Tools. It started mid-February, and I know there was the page layout algorithm on the 6th, and I've heard mention of a Panda update around the 11th, so I started to wonder what was resposible. A manual penalty was just recently removed, too. As I dug deeper, I discovered other problems. For one a misredirected blog causing 404s, plus a redirected site whose duplicate pages were never removed from Google's index. There are also two exact match domains 301 redirected to the site, but there were no links or content prior to the redirect. In a site:operator search, one is showing a duplicate homepage. When the wordpress.com blog was redirected, it was not redirected to the /blog subdirectory. Could the resulting 404s which go back as far as I can see in GWT (3 month limit) be the cause of this drop? We're talking about hundreds of blog pages and their links. FYI the main nav in /blog pointed to the old site until 2/7 when I pointed them to the existing domain (so hundreds, if not thousands of links were being redirected) The million dollar question is: is it just the 301 redirect issue causing the problem here? It looks like I might just have exacerbated it when I fixed the nav menu links. Will fixing the redirect rescue the impressions? My plan of attack includes killing the 301 redirects from the exact match domains with no backlinks, and removing the old site from Google's index from within GWT. Any yays or nays? FYI, a 301 redirect of .index.html, default.asp, and non-www was done 1/8,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kimmiedawn
the reconsideration request was sent 1/24, manual penalty lifted 2/10. Index.html still redirects twice, going to www.site.com/index.html before resolving at .com. Same with default.asp. IarDs8u0 -
Closing down site and redirecting its traffic to another
OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry. Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US. Site B hosts rentals in Canada only. We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on. Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B. On to the question: We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine. Here's what we've come up with (2 options): When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we: 1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A? 2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A. Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert> We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that. Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on. Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up. Thoughts? We've never done this before. It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites. We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A. Thanks for any/all help. Marc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | THB0 -
I'm worried my client is asking me to post duplicate content, am I just being paranoid?
Hi SEOMozzers, I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries. My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content. So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media). My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent. I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content. Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid? Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
Geo-targeted Organic Search Traffic to a sub-domain
For a client of ours, we are likely to create a sub-domain that is to be targeted at a specific country. Most of the content on this sub-domain will be from the main site, although with some specific differentiation to suit that geographic market. We intend to tell Google through Webmaster Centre that the sub-domain is targeted at a specific country. Some questions: a) Any idea how long it could take before google gives precedence to the content in this sub-domain for queries originating from that particular country? b) What is the likely impact of content duplication ? What extent of differentiation is necessary from a search engine perspective? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ontarget-media1 -
If I were to change the geographic keyword such as "foreclosures in Dallas" on 20 related blogs to "foreclosures in Los Angeles" what would happen?
In other words I'm wondering if someone built up an internet presence for their company through multiple websites over the years and then decided to move to another part of the united states, would it work to change all the keywords to the new location? Would that work toward getting them ranked in the new area or would you have to create entirely new websites? Thanks guys.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whorneff3100