PDF web traffic hitting our site

[ICMPmarketing]

Hi there,

Over the last few months our traffic has spiked due to irrelevant pdf documents sending us crap traffic, our bounce rate is sky high as well as other metrics.  I don't want to just filter out this traffic in GA rather try and stop our site from being attacked.

Any advice on a way forward would be great.

Thanks

[brettmandoes]

Based on this I don't think you have anything to worry about. It doesn't appear to be an attack, as you described in your original post. An actual attack on your website would have much higher volume. The worst this could possibly be is spam, which is mainly just annoying.

Easy solution: you don't want to filter out this traffic from GA because it may be useful at some point. So just create another view in GA, and name it "unfiltered". This view will have no filters and you can see all traffic in its raw glory. In your main view, name it something like "master" or "the one view to view them all" or whatever you want and set filters to remove that traffic from view.

Personally it looks more to me like these are old pdfs that other websites are linking to, which is what your hosting provider has also said. Your best move here is actually to setup redirects to relevant pages to recapture some of those links that are probably ending in 404s and get some link equity to important pages.

[ICMPmarketing]

HI Alick, seems to be coming from an external source, I've included a screen grab for you too.

I've also discussed this with our hosting provider who gave the following response:

Thanks for the info from Webmaster Tools. That screenshot that shows the HTTP response is just showing that a request to http://www.icmp.co.uk/lulu-the-lioness-a-heroines-story.pdf throws a 301 redirect over to https://www.icmp.ac.uk/lulu-the-lioness-a-heroines-story.pdf — this runs because of the standard HTTPS/primary domain redirect code in settings.php and unfortunately doesn’t tell us much here.

I pulled down the database again and ran a search for a few of these filenames, and those came up empty. Looks like these don’t touch Drupal at all. When we saw them in the database before, in the sessions table, that was likely just because that filter module was storing browser history in user session data for some reason.

I did a little research here, and I think that leaves a few potential causes:

Another site is linking to these files (even though they don’t exist), and this is where Google is picking up/indexing the URLs from. This should be checkable in Google Analytics if you look at Referrals to those files.

These were listed on the sitemap at some point (but not any longer: https://www.icmp.ac.uk/sitemap.xml).

These files existed at some point in the past, but have since been deleted.

There was a DNS misconfiguration at some point, and that domain name was pointing to a different server where these files did exist.

While these are a little annoying to see in Analytics, from what I’ve read, 404s don’t negatively impact the site from an SEO standpoint, and there’s no evidence that the site itself is compromised at all, so unless we see evidence otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about these.

d3bTbrU

[Alick300]

Hi,

Pdf trafic from your own site or other sites?