Spammy traffic
-
Hi guys! There has been an unusual amount of traffic to one particular page on our blog. Now that the business is slow, I had the time to look into it. Half of that traffic is coming from India and we are a Chicago based limo service. We 'll skip why that happens part for now.
I let Hotjar record 100 session and upon reviewing them I have noticed a lot of sessions with no interaction, no mouse movement, no clicks; just scroll and exit. My question is related to implementing a type of verification (captcha) for that blog page to see if the bots / behavior changes.
Are there any downside in terms of in page SEO for this type of implementation?
What is good practice for something like this? -
This is usually spam related traffic. Nothing you can do about but their goal is to spam either your guestbook, comment section or contact forms. Make sure it's well protected. These spam comments could run into the hundreds a day if you dont properly protect your website.
It's the number one reason why i dislike using wordpress in the first place. You gotta dedicate 5 plugins at least for security, spam and other things before having it running. And spammers do change tactics. Wordpress sites are being attacked all the time. Pretty much 60 to 80% of traffic on blogs are garbage.
-
My two cents, just let it go. There is likely downside to 'hiding' your content behind a captcha just to see if the traffic is real or not. Especially as it could be something that is hurting SEO as you're loading another script to the page. In the end, what's the downside of having a ton of traffic going to a page, maybe a few extra dollars in server costs but usually I haven't seen any other issues.
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
-
Slow growth in organic traffic
Hi, Recently our website after 5 months of launch started seeing more organic traffic, thanks to the seo effort being put. However, off late the growth is quite slow and we don't see much increase in organic traffic any more. Any idea on what could have happened to cause this or is it normal. Here is the link to the website to check and if you can recommend anything - https://www.keyhub.com Thanks, Search-Console-Search-Analytics-https-www-keyhub-com-1.png
Reporting & Analytics | | kh-priyam1 -
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
Spam Direct Traffic
Hello, Lately, I have been receiving a big amount of unexpected direct traffic from Boston. After analyzing with Analytivs, this is what I get (please, check attachment). Normally I would be blocking this traffic source straight away from my Google Analytics account, and also blocking this traffic from accesing my servers, but check out the analytic metrics: this traffic represents 12% of my total traffic right now!!! av. session duration is 4:53 !! bounce rate is 72% !!!! pages/session 1.44 !! Service provider is "Microsoft Corporation" who looks like one of the typical spammy service providers. My question is, is this a bot?? what do you think ? Thanks, Luis zUlVHIi
Reporting & Analytics | | Yeeply.com1 -
How to stop Spam Referral Traffic?
We get referral traffic from Spammers to our Wordpress sites. That traffic comes from different countries: Russia, Ukraine, India, Germany, Pakistan etc. What's the best way to get rid of it? Setting up filters in Google Analytics? Is there something else that I need to do? Is there a plug-in that could help? Does that traffic have a negative impact on my SEO? Does it affect the rankings?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO2 -
Web traffic in steady decline since launching responsive design in July
The launch of the responsive design is the only event we can correlate to the beginning of the decline in overall visits to the website since July, however we're not sure if this is the issue. To give you some background, the website http://www.precisionpestcontrol.com.au/ is a pest control site in a highly competitive industry where there are many black hat tactics going on with huge keyword competition on a small range of keywords, however historically the website traffic for the above site has been gaining momentum. We create/ update 2 or 3 pages every month with rich content and post 8 blogs every month on pest control related topics. We have done the initial keyword research and all the keywords we used are medium to high volume terms. We don't do any black hat tactics or dodgy link building, we have invested time submitting the site to legitimate business listings in the past. It just seems strange that all of a sudden we go responsive and start to lose searchengine traffic. Possible Issues What we've been able to find so far were some pages that were not redirected properly, probably about 5, and 2 pages that seemed to lead to a 404 error. These have only just been fixed recently, otherwise the mobile site has been functioning effectively. Could this be the reason we have been in decline over the past few months? We also seem to have lost a whole lot of external links somehow, the external link measurement in MOZ has gone from 1500, up to 6,000 then down to 300 or so in the space of a few months. Basically we're trying to figure out what we're doing wrong, or what we can do to try and stop the decline of visits. We've checked the algorithm updates and don't think that Panda or the shift to the Google AI would have penalised us, but then again we could be wrong. Any advice anyone could offer would be hugely appreciated. Happy to provide any data for anyone to have a look at.
Reporting & Analytics | | Peter.Huxley590 -
We lost great amount of Google Traffic. Need Expert Advice, Please!
We are in the business of selling home and commercial light fixtures for about 10 years now. Our website is a very large ecommerce website with more than 40K pages including category, sub-category and product pages. We have been getting decent organic traffic mostly from highly competitive keywords and also from product/solution specific long tail keywords. Recently when Google changed the EMD algo we have seen a dip in the traffic (say about 60%). I can't be so sure that this is because of EMD update, but it started happening only after this update. There has been a rank drop from 1st page to 2nd page, decrease in no. of keywords driving traffic, decrease in no. of pages driving traffic, all these things have an negative impact on our organic revenue. I know that our back link portfolio is bad and the reason behind this is the SEO companies that we previously worked with, Thanks to them for this sloppy work. Other than back links, Is there anything fundamentally wrong on our website. Here is the URL http://bit.ly/QVFHgr
Reporting & Analytics | | goldenageusa0 -
URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
Hey people, I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Reporting & Analytics | | dumperama
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user) Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP. But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month. Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords. You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped. So I'd like to know if you observed similar results. Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago? Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though. All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise... I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!0