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
-
Tracking Organic Traffic and Conversions from multiple TLDs with Google Tag Manager
Hello Guys, I want to track traffic / conversions from different domains (basically same brand - but a lot of different TLD's). The "problem" is that the main conversion which I want to track always happens on the .com TLD and all other TLD's link to there. The problem is, that now the traffic always counts as Referral Traffic, even after setting up cross domain tracking over the google tag manager... So example: Sessions begins on example.co.uk/landing-page11 after User searched on it on google. He decides to buy the product and therefore moves to example.com for the checkout process. No I will have the conversion in my google analytics under referral with example.co.uk. --> but I want to have it under organic, and not under referral. How I can manage this? Thanks for you Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | _Heiko_0 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ?
Why am i still seeing very recent organic kw traffic being reported in Analytics if G is now fully encrypted ? Should it not all be 'Not Provided' now ? When this fully roles out if not already wont it be impossible to distinguish between brand and non brand kw ? Cheers Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Rank #1 for a 110,000/month query search, but barely any traffic?
Hi guys, As it says in the title, we've recently reached the absolute #1 position for a certain key phrase in the travel industry which the Google Keyword Tool tells me averages 110,000 local (165,000 global) searches a month... however we have received barely any traffic at all over the past TWO months for it and I'm trying my best to determine why. We've checked on multiple different devices with all forms of personalisation off, different browsers, 3G connections as opposed to office Wi-FI etc. and it still returns us as the #1 rank. Meta descriptions and title tags are pretty much pristine if I don't say so myself, however what should be a very lucrative key phrase is currently returning little to no traffic results. Has anyone had experience in a similar situation to this? Any possible causes that I might be missing? Would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | ExperienceOz0 -
Huge Traffic Drop?
I am seeing a huge 30-40% traffic drop which started around 8-9 PM EST last night. I am compare the stats of today with last Saturday and the drop is significant. I am checking it in Google Analytics and Clicky and both report the same. The Adsense impressions drop also show the same. The rankings of my top keywords seem to be fine. I re-checked them using ranktracker for Google US, UK and others. I don't understand what has happened here. Anyone else seeing the drop? Is there a Google Panda update underway?
Reporting & Analytics | | abhim120 -
Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Reporting & Analytics | | CassisGroup
Any thoughts?0 -
Why does Google Analytics think PPC traffic is organic?
I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Mud_Rookie1