Direct traffic coming to URLs with /rss_feedIP#

[newwhy]

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?

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Natalie,

What's the RSS plugin that your client's site is using?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi again

My bad! Did you try checking your internal links or sitemap? A quick crawl with ScreamingFrog can help pinpoint any link issues.

Also did you check the hostname on those links? Does it come up as our domain? Just want to double check that it isn't referral.

Let me know! Good luck!

[newwhy]

Thanks, Patrick! The strange thing is that this comes as direct traffic, not referral traffic. We've definitely experienced the referral spam phenomenon, but this is like nothing I've ever seen. I don't think it's spam, but I'm not sure how or why it's being created.

I'll filter the landing pages from Analytics, but we're mostly just curious where and why those URLs are being created / hit.

Thanks again.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

This happens time to time - what you can do is create a filter to eliminate this traffic from your GA reporting.

Here's a few great resources:
How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data
What to Do About Fake BS Surge of Google Analytics Visits Definitive Guide to Removing Referral Spam

You could also take the time to go through your backlinks and see if any of them are worth removing or disavowing. Since this is a RSS Feed, it won't be very easy at all, but this is a nice process to have in your back pocket if needed.

Hope this helps! Good luck!