Huge spike in referral traffic from international domains

[Silkstream]

We have recently experienced a huge spike in referral traffic from .fr domains (we are in the UK).

They all lead to our 404 page. Its been going on for the last 3 days, and its still happening with about 20 visitors browsing the site from these domains at any one time, staying approx 3-7 seconds and then bouncing.

The top domain appears to be a parked page. We cant see any obvious links or ads coming from any of these .fr domains and they are quite irrelevant to our sites industry anyway, which leads me to believe these may not be real visitors.

Any advice on what may be causing this? And how to stop it?

Needless to say none of these referrals have converted.

[TimKelsey]

Good point, Gianluca! I hadn't thought of that.

[gfiorelli1]

The same Tim wrote, but adding an extra step: check out if your site suffers some sort of vulnerabilities, like cloaking that could justify the unexpected interest from international users.

[TimKelsey]

I suppose it's possible to block that traffic through your server, but unless it's costing you a lot of money on bandwidth, I don't think it's necessary to go that far.

Instead, I'd recommend just excluding that referring domain from your traffic reports. If you're using Google Analytics, you can do this by adding a filter to the profile - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en

Hope this helps!

Tim