Direct / (none) Spam Traffic Help
-
In July 2015, we experienced an over 1,000% increase in traffic and it has remained like that ever since. It's all spam traffic and I have no clue how to get rid of it. I added in your typical .htaccess blocks from known culprits with little to no effect. Read up on Ghost traffic and applied filters to no effect. The spam is completely distributed as far as I can tell both geographically as well as by network providers. Where once we had pretty decent bounce rates of around 50%, now, since all my Analytics data is meaningless - it's around 90%. I could apply a filter but beyond my GA account providing no insights, I'm also concerned about the increased use of server resources. I'd ideally like to stop the traffic completely.
The only distinguishing feature of the traffic that I have been able to determine is browser size. Comparing June 2015 to July 2015 we saw the following:
Browser size visits:
620 x 460 = 6,828 vs 0, 610 x 450 = 175 vs 0, 1330 x 630 = 71 vs 1, 1890 x 940 = 67 vs 0, 780 x 580 = 58 v 5.
Other than that, I can find no unifying theme to the traffic beyond being traffic hitting our homepage and having no medium. Nothing special that I am aware of happened in July. We didn't do any sort of...really anything. We did have our network compromised by ransomware in the beginning of June, which we promptly ignored and restored backups - at no point did we try to contact the criminals, but I am doubtful there is any connection considering that our website is remotely hosted.
If anyone has any suggestions or has seen anything like this before, please let me know.
-
Thanks for your insights John. I was hoping, albeit naively, that there was some overlooked silver bullet that I could apply but it does seem that this issue is not going to be solved by some mystical cure-all. Your suggestion of inspecting the browser size is probably the best bet. Unwanted traffic will still slip through, but I should be able to minimize it quite a bit.
-
This is a tough question. I had something similar happen - a lot of distributed traffic, that wasn't real but looks real-ish. I don't remember the screen sizes we had, but it was mostly old-ish versions of IE.
Since the main action people do on our site is Search, we added a ReCaptcha after people search a certain number of times. We also found some paths the spammers take through the site and created some controls to block, or Captcha, those paths. It's a tough balance, though, because you don't want to ban real users from the site.
Could you use some JS to inspect the browser, then set a cookie? Then your server-side could look for the cookie on subsequent requests and send them to /stop-eating-my-bandwidth-you-jerk.html or a more business-friendly equivalent.
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
-
Rogerbot directives in robots.txt
I feel like I spend a lot of time setting false positives in my reports to ignore. Can I prevent Rogerbot from crawling pages I don't care about with robots.txt directives? For example., I have some page types with meta noindex and it reports these to me. Theoretically, I can block Rogerbot from these with a robots,txt directive and not have to deal with false positives.
Reporting & Analytics | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Track conversion from paypal express/Apple pay
Hi All, Is there any way to track apple pay conversion or paypal express conversion in Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Is Google doing anything about the spam referrer plague in Google Analytics?
My client manages 15+ websites and we have observed the spam referrer issue has gotten steadily worse and worse in the last few months. I took the time to weed out the worst offenders via traffic filters but our referral traffic source garden was quickly full of weeds again a few weeks later. Does anybody know what the Google Analytics development team is doing to combat the spam referrer issue? I find it quite amazing that Google goes through the asinine effort to block out organic keyword data ("not found" & "not provided) but they don't seem to care about blacklisting/filtering spam referrers. RHnE6Wx
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB3 -
Feedburner stats show drop in multiple feeds from 6/21/13 to 6/22\. Anyone else seen the same?
Client has 3 RSS feeds in Feedburner, and they saw a drop in subscribers from 6/21 to 6/22. Wondering if anyone else has saw a drop recently. Obviously, this could be the results of multiple people cleaning up their feeds, but it appears too coincidental. Has anyone heard if there are any recent issues with Feedburner tracking?
Reporting & Analytics | | DanaLookadoo0 -
Google Webmaster Tools is showing wrong data - help?
Hey all, I'm seeing some weird problems with Webmaster Tools. Specifically: We've submitted a sitemap with 174k URLs. According to the WMT dashboard, only 21 are indexed, though if you search our site via site:sitename.com blah blah, there are thousands of pages returned. Why is WMT only showing 21 indexed pages? Yet if I go to Health -> Index Status, it's showing nearly 199k URLs indexed. This seems consistent with searching Google site:sitename.com blah blah. Under "Search Queries", it's showing "no data available". Not sure why as it's linked to the proper Google Analytics account, which has keyword data. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | chimptech0 -
Help with Analytics
Afternoon all - I hope someome might be able to help me getting some data out of Google Analytics. I want to try pull a report which will show me both what the last page before a goal completion was and the country that generated the click. Is that possible at all? When I go to look at goals, I can only pull data for the last page before the goal click ... and when I look at my goals in the Pages>Content menu, I can only view country. So is there any way of pulling the two set of data together at all? Any thoughts would be really appreciated. Thanks very much, Simon
Reporting & Analytics | | theshortstack0 -
Google Analytics help - exporting reports
Hey mozzers, A little help if you will. I am in traffic sources > sources > search > organic I am view keywords and comparing 1 month with another. Now I see what 1 keyword sends 1st month, 2nd month and % Change. I want to export this data to an .xls file. When I do, I end up with a file that shows what 1 keyword sends 1st month and 2nd month, but no % Change! I really need to include this in exported document.... Summary: Analytics hates me. 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | MirandaP0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0