Why do I get lots of traffic from a bizarre keyword?
-
Bit of an odd one but I've been getting a large and steady stream of traffic over the last few months from a very random keyword that according to addwords figures shows "on data". Its our second biggest referring term only beaten by our brand name. We get more traffic from this term than keywords we have invested a lot of time in that show thousands of traffic volume in addwords. When looking at behavioral data its gets odder, a bounce rate of 98.11% time on site 2 seconds and page visits 1.02. So this traffic isn't real traffic and it's not real people. So my questions are, what is it? why do we get this random traffic, has anyone els noticed things like this and is it a problem?
I presume it must be something to do with some sort of spam but apart from that i'm stumped.
It's just one of those things that has been bugging me so I would appreciate any help.
Kind Regards
Paul
-
Paul,
- Have you linked the AdWords account to the GA account?
- Have you enabled Import Cost Data in AdWords?
- Make sure that query string parameters remain in the URL bar when you visit your destination URL.
- Have you tested to see if your GA cookies reset when visiting your 2nd or 3rd pages?
Adrian Vender
-
yeah I had just used the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool that pulls in data from the google search based tool and it shows "no data" across the board.
-
If you show up on the image results thats most likely your problem! Use the google keyword tool to see how much traffic that keyword gets
-
Sorry i should have mentioned in my first post that we do rank second for the term. But the term is so bizarre that I can not believe the traffic is real and also the bounce rate, time on site and so on are extremely abnormal. We do also show up in the image results.
-
easiest way to find out if this is the cause: find out what term the traffic is coming in from and type it into your search engine. I spent ages wonderig why I was getting all this traffic from obscure terms like 'pound sign' and 'stephen hawkings' until I realised I was ranking first for them in Google UK Image search
-
Yeah good point. The traffic for the term only comes from google.co.uk. Yahoo and Bing dont refer the keyword at all.
-
Anyway to dig in to see what search engine those referring keywords come from? Like craven22 said, it might be an image search.
-
Thanks. Hmmm maybe. How would you find out if someone was hotlinking to an image?
-
Thanks Steve, We are just using Google analytics .
-
Are you sure you aren't ranking high up for a popular image search in google? Most likely people searching for something then hotlinking your image
-
Sounds like a bot or scraper to me. That's strange because usually bots/scrapers don't execute javascript which is needed to show up in Google Analytics. What analytics package do you use?
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
-
Filter Remote Workers Traffic
For the most part in the past our company has worked on location. So filtering internal traffic was as simple as filtering out our company IPs as well as a few remote workers IPS. Now a large number of employees are working from home due to Covid-19. I am seeing an uptick in traffic that is clearly employee-related. I am hoping some of you who work with large remote teams may have some suggestions on how to best filter out traffic from remote working employees. I found a few articles from a couple of years ago where people were using a cookie but not sure we can get that implemented in time as our Dev team is backed up. Any help is much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | RMATVMC0 -
60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic
For some pre-reading, Groupon experimented with deindexing part of their site back in 2014 and found that they had a big drop in direct traffic: http://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415 Recently I've conducted a similar test on a very large site and have found that Direct dropped somewhere between 50-80% for the pages deindexed, depending on the day (It has been running for ~4 days). Has anyone else tried this experiment before? If so what were your results?
Reporting & Analytics | | Leads.Bz
What I'm most interested in now is to find out why this traffic is classed as Direct - there appears to be no reason why the site or server would interfere, so I can only imagine that Google is sending traffic without referrer data. Does anyone have any thoughts as to why they would do that?0 -
Direct traffic coming to URLs with /rss_feedIP#
I'm doing a site audit for an organization that has a bunch of really messy old Drupal sites. In looking at their traffic, I see that a majority of it is coming to landing pages that look like this: http://clientsdomain.com/rss_feed173.8.208.97 plus other IP addresses. The bounce rate is 100% and time on site is less than a second. It looks like something that an RSS feed tool might use, but I've never seen something like it before. It creates its own landing page, hits the site, then appears to bounce. This is making their Analytics data look a whole lot worse than the site is actually doing, since the bounce rate is 100% on all that fake traffic. I have some experience with Drupal, but I've never seen anything like this in Drupal or any other CMS. Has anyone out there ever experienced something like this, where direct traffic comes to an rss feed landing page and bounces immediately?
Reporting & Analytics | | newwhy0 -
Google referral traffic drop around 14th July 2014 (UK). Anyone else seeing it?
We've seen around a 25% drop in Google referral traffic from the 14th July 2014 onwards and having real trouble identifying why and from what search terms we're being effected. WMT and Moz Pro don't show any movement. Is anyone else seeing the same thing on UK search terms? Seems a bit late to be the effect of Panda 4.0? Any help would be amazing. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | whis1 -
Does this traffic drop look like Penguin to you?
Dear Community In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1. While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?) I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics. dPnphnr
Reporting & Analytics | | Masoko-T0 -
False inflation in traffic
Hi- We are seeing an inflation in our traffic via Webgain in Germany. Our team in Germany does not use Webgains Our team in the US does not participate in any affiliate networks/programs Any ideas on why we would be seeing this inflation in just one region?
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
What keywords are called conversion keywords? how do you track them ?
I have tried more than 200 keywords to optimize Akshaya Patra website, but i am finding it difficult to analyzie the lead /convesrion keywords to rank our website at the top of search results. How many keywords do you suggest for conversion , how do you utilize the keywords to ensure we are ahead of the competitors We are a nonprofit organisation, HQ is in India, our main focus is to feed underprivieled children in India website URL www.akshayapatra.org
Reporting & Analytics | | AkshayaPatra0 -
How long does it take to get results from the Term Extractor Tool?
Hi! I entered a web page into the Term Extractor Tool, and it's been running for about 3 minutes now. How long does it usually take? Thanks 🙂 Kelley
Reporting & Analytics | | kinsana0