Dealing with Dodgy Looking Traffic

[BrinvaleBird]

Hi there I am really hoping someone can help.

The site I run has started receiving traffic from the US (we are a UK run firm who don't ship overseas). Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a massive problem but the traffic is coming directly to lots of pages and instantly bouncing. I am worried this is going to negatively impact my rankings as drop off rate and conversions are getting hammered by this 'fake traffic'.

The attached image shows the traffic for the homepage but its happening on every page with hundreds of hits bouncing and hurting my stats.

Is there any way of dealing with this or reporting it to an authority or even Google itself?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

George

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[effectdigital]

Hey George,

As you say, Google shouldn't be inferring ranking adaptations from your data, for your site (within your Google Analytics profile). If they use any data in that kind of way, it would probably be from Search Console (which is actually Google's data, from their side)

If you can identify that it certainly is bot traffic, then it's unlikely that Google would move on it at all. They're very good at detecting fake traffic. Back in the day 'click-farms' used to be a thing, hundreds of people in third world countries (or a robot) clicking Google search results to try and increase CTR. If they've taken measures to filter that out (which they have) then 'dumb' bot traffic shouldn't impact you much

That being said, if all the bot traffic slows your site down a lot and then causes real users to react negatively to their browsing experience, that could be something which Google might pin you on

Your main thing to do is to really identify the traffic and what network domain it's coming from. If it looks obviously 'bot-like' then you can take measures to block requests from that area of the web. Be careful though, it might be a legitimate crawler, even Rodgerbot (the Moz crawler!)

See if you can pin the traffic to a network domain in GA, and then an IP-range in something like AWStats or server-log based analysis software. If you can say, yeah that IP range is probably that network domain and my vague idea of what it is, is X - then you'll be in a much better (more informed) place to proceed

[BrinvaleBird]

Hi Effect Digital,

Wow, you are a star! Thank you so much for your help.

That article is great. I seem to have fallen into a trap a lot of us fall into in assuming that bounce rate is a kind of instant drop off statistic. Knowing that it is measuring the percentage of single engagement use hugely changes things! But that said the dwell time from this fake traffic is poor.

As the nature of the traffic is 'direct' rather than coming from google or any other engine does this then matter? Now as I know about the bounce rate vs pogo sticking debate I can't see that google will see this traffic as much of an issue? If Google isn't reading my analytics data I can't see how this now matters other than polluting the analytics data?

I was struggling to even find a name for it so having that helps a lot too!

Thanks,

George

[effectdigital]

First of all, most people believe that metrics from Google Analytics (including bounce rate) do not affect your ranking results or SEO intake. Here's a post on the subject: https://conversionxl.com/guides/bounce-rate/seo-impact/

There's no need to let anyone know, the only reason to tackle this is:

a) it's polluting your analytics data and ruining your insights

b) you're at constant risk of DDoS

If you don't care about either of those things then, it really doesn't matter at all

If you want to take better steps to identify this mystery traffic

1. https://d.pr/i/hzBJTg.png (GA screenshot)
2. https://d.pr/i/BmNK6n.png (GA screenshot)
3. https://d.pr/i/Xryszu.png (GA screenshot)

I find these 3 steps in Analytics to be a pretty effective starting point