Direct traffic is up 2100% (due to a bot/crawler I believe)
-
Hi,
The direct traffic to website www.webgain.dk has increased by over 2100% recently. I can see that most of it is from US (my target audience is in Denmark and the website is in danish).
What can I do about this? All this traffic gives my website a bounce rate of 99.91% for direct traffic. I believe it is some sort of bot/crawler. -
Already done. They also included the tip in their newsletter for beta-testers.
-
You might want to let them know about this, so they can add in documentation so future users know what is up before panicking.
-
Follow up: I have fixed this now. It was a monitoring tool by Digicure, where I have signed up to be a beta tester. Their platform checks the website like a normal visitor from servers around the world (in my test case it is Denmark and California) and thereby it looked like normal direct traffic in my data. I excluded their stated server IP-addresses in my Google Analytics filters and that helped. Thanks again guys for the help.
-
Thank you for all your great advice. I will follow them and see how it works.
-
If you are running Wordpress also check what page / pages are being accessed. I have had bots nail my wp-login like that before. If that is the case harden your installation, one thing I have found that stopped it was setting a deny in the htaccess on wp-login / wp-admin.
-
I was having the same problem ( for me it seemed to be Bings ads bot) . I used this guide below and it seems to filter out most of the bot visits.
-
I would check the service providers first just to know for sure they're all coming from the same provider. You can check this by visiting your Audience > Technology > Network report on the left side of your Google Analytics. If you see the same network and browsers being used I would use a filter (only if you're really determined/ 100% sure that it's bot traffic) to get them completely out of your Google Analytics view.
-
It's weird that the bot is accepting cookies, but with a bounce rate that high, I agree it's probably something automated (though it could be people who were looking for something else or were directed there by an email or an app accidentally). You can look through your logs to see IP addresses and then do as Atakala says and block the traffic if you're worried about bandwidth. You can also just filter it out in GA by excluding US traffic (if your'e worried about analytics being messed up).
-
It's probably AWS, which is amazon buyable crawl service.
If ıt costs you too much then try to ban it.
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
-
How do you optimise a website for European traffic?
I have a design portfolio website here https://www.nicholsoncreative.com/ which uses a .com but is currently configured through the Search Console to appear in results for Google.co.uk. I am going to be restructuring the website and optimisation and I want to bring in more traffic/enquiries/business from around Europe. As there's no Google.eu, and as Google also serves results based on the searchers geographic location it would seem difficult to structure and optimise content so that results can be found across all of Europe. I assume simply switching to a .eu domain extension for my own website wouldn't solve the problem? I also assume that creating content in different languages would be a logical (if time consuming) option? Are there any other tried and trusted techniques that can be used to target traffic throughout Europe? I'd appreciate any advice.
International SEO | | JCN-SBWD0 -
Getting accurate Geo Location traffic stats in Google Analytics - HELP
One of our clients services the US and the UK, but having looked at the report over an extended period of time we can still see that the vast majority of traffic is coming from the US. I.e. our last report for March indicated that there were over 3,000 users in the US but only 6 in the UK. We know that Google Analytics works out a user’s location based on where their IP is located and not their physical location, and that this means that the data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it won’t always represent what you expect. That being said, we know that the traffic figures for Europe are largely inaccurate and would like to get some more accurate stats to report on. Is there a way to do so at all within Google Analytics?
International SEO | | Wagada1 -
International SEO - Alternatives to Automatic IP re-direct
Hello, When doing international SEO I've read that it's not good practice to automatically re-direct users to the correct part of the website based on their IP address. But what alternatives are there to this? Let's say you're targeting the US and the UK through multiregional SEO. What can you do to ensure that users from the US go to the US sub-directory and that users from the UK go to the UK sub-directory? In Moz's international SEO guide it says that: "If you choose to try to guess at the user’s language preference when they enter your site, you can use the browser’s language setting or the IP address and ask the user to confirm the choice. Using JavaScript to do this will ensure that Googlebot does not get confused. Pair this with a good XML sitemap and the user can have a great interaction. Plus, the search engines will be able to crawl and index all of your translated content." Can anyone explain this further? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance
International SEO | | SEOCT0 -
International Confusion between .com and .com/us
A question regarding International SEO: We are seeing cases for many sites that meet these criteria: -International sites that have www.example.com/ ip redirecting to country site based on ip redirect (ex. www.example.com/ 301 to www.example.com/us -There is a desktop + mobile site (www.example.com + m.example.com) The issue we see is Google shows www.example.com/ in US search results instead of www.example.com/us in search results. Since the .com/ redirects, there is no mobile version, and www.example.com/ also shows up in mobile SERPs instead of m.example.com/us. My questions are: 1. If www.example.com/ is redirecting users and Googlebot, why is Googlebot caching it with the content of www.example.com/us? 2. Why is www.example.com/ showing up in SERPs instead of www.example.com/us? 3. How can we help Google display www.example.com/us and m.example.com/us in SERPs instead of www.example.com/? Thanks!!
International SEO | | FranFerrara0 -
/en-us/ Outranking Root Domain and other hreflang errors
I'm working with a new site that has a few regional sites in subdirectories /en-us/, /en-au/, etc and just noticed that some of our interior pages (ourdomain.com/en-us/interior-page1/ ) are outranking the equivalent ourdomain.com/interior-page1. This only occurs in some SERPS while others correctly display the non-regional result. I was told we have hreflang tags implemented correctly in the meta information of each of our pages but have yet to research deeply. Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Any help would be appreciated as I am a little lost. Cheers, Andrew
International SEO | | AndyMitty0 -
If domain mapping subfolders to TLD's is it perceived as a fully separate entity/site therafter ?
Hi I take it once you have domain mapped a country specific subfolder to a country specific TLD (for better local region targeting reasons) Google perceives it as a completely separate entity and it no longer shares any of the parent sites domain benefits (such as domain authority etc) so from that point on requires its own dedicated link building etc ? All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Best URL structure for Multinational/Multilingual websites
Hi I am wondering what the best URL format to use is when a website targets several countries, in several languages. (without owning the local domains, only a .com, and ideally to use sub-folders rather than sub-domains.) As an example, to target a hotel in Sweden (Google.se) are there any MUST-HAVE indicators in the URL to target the relevant countries? Such as hotelsite.com**/se/**hotel-name. Would this represent the language? Or is it the location of the product? To clarify a bit, I would like to target around 10 countries, with the product pages each having 2 languages (the local language + english). I'm considering using the following format: hotelsite.com/en/hotel-name (for english) and hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name (for swedish content of that same product) and then using rel=”alternate” hreflang=”se-SV” markup to target the /se/ page for Sweden (Google.se) and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” for UK? And to also geotarget those in Webmaster tools using those /se/ folders etc. Would this be sufficient? Or does there need to be an indicator of both the location, AND the language in the URLs? I mean would the URL's need to be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name/se-SV (for swedish) or can it just be hotelsite.com/se/hotel-name? Any thoughts on best practice would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | pikka0 -
Link Builder Freelance/Agency in Italy_
Hi! We are looking for a link builder freelance or an SEO agency specialized in link building for the Italian market. Could you recommend any? Did anyone have any experience with a good Italian agency/freelance? Thanks!
International SEO | | jorgediaz0