Malicious bot attack?
-
Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet.
Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank.
Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based.
Has anyone seen this before?
-
I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months?
Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern.
I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.
-
try
http://sucuri.net/website-firewall/
or
Stop bot attack resulting in a more secure website. Stop bots
-
Google analytics has issue with ghost referrals and find out what the referral name is parking in the block it in GA
UA numbers ending in two and three are not effected for some reason
You're hosting company can update software in order to make this stop
hope this helps
Tom
-
I would strongly recommend Cloudflare to address this type of problem. They have massive data on malicious sources and offer tools to mitigate attacks like you're facing.
-
Have you tried digging deeper into the type of browser and OS they're emulating? Chances are you could get a pretty precise block on just their activity if you match up their browser, screen dimension, OS, versions, etc without affecting any other users.
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
-
It's possible a bounce-rate attack manipulate SEO?
My site has been visited by unusual users with one second session times. This leaves my analytics data confused.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CompraBit0 -
Malicious bots
I was looking at some recommended keywords and felt sick to my stomach when I saw ilovevitaly.com search shell, resellerclub scam and a few more. | 2. | | 28(2.29%)ilovevitaly.com search shell | 0.00% | 0(0.00%) | 42.86% | 1.75 | 00:10:13 | 0.00% | 0(0.00%) | $0.00(0.00%) |
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BlueprintMarketing
| | 3. | resellerclub scam | I believe I have found the multiple IP addresses in which they're coming from and when I say many I mean I found 200 or so. There from different C blocks so they're very difficult to block easily without blocking legitimate traffic. I'm using a couple of different web application firewalls with the ability to block it pretty much anything. Does anyone have any device on doing this in a manner that might be more efficient than what I'm doing.I definitely do not want Google to think this is something that I did and penalize somebody this would be horrible. The site is going through Sucuri.net to be cleaned of any possible infection right now I do not know how this happened but zero day attacks are unfortunately a very real reality and unfortunately it could've been 1 million things. Thanks a million guys. I appreciate your help,
Tom0 -
Spamlink attack wat to do
Since today we had a spamlink attack. Just 150 dirty links in one morning and probably more to follow. Last year we also had an attack and we used the disalow. But this domain had a much stronger histrory and a PR of 6. The new domain has an authority (DA36) and PR1. The domain is very valuable and we rank on page on one of the most competitive words. Should I use the disalow tool, or just hope that the spam links don't hurt my ranking. I have some (150) valuable incoming links. Example of bad link: http://lamevabarcelona.com/una-exposicio-ens-guia-per-barcelona/dscn0756/ I think X Rumer/ pingback is used. I hope somebody can help us with this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | remkoallertz0 -
Correct way to block search bots momentarily... HTTP 503?
Hi, What is the best way to block googlebot etc momentarily? For example, if I am implementing a programming update to our magento ecommerce platform and am unsure of the results and potential layout/ file changes that may impact SEO (Googlebot continuously spiders our site) How can you block the bots for like 30 mins or so? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Victim of Negative SEO - Can I Redirect the Attacked Page to an External Site?
My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks? I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site. The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks. Would appreciate any suggestions 🙂 Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Yet another Negative SEO attack question.
I need help reconciling two points of view on spammy links. On one hand, Google seems to say, "Don't build spammy links to your website - it will hurt your ranking." Of course, we've seen the consequences of this from the Penguin update, of those who built bad links got whacked. From the Penguin update, there was then lots of speculation of Negative SEO attacks. From this, Google is saying, "We're smart enough to detect a negative SEO attack.", i.e: http://youtu.be/HWJUU-g5U_I So, its seems like Google is saying, "Build spammy links to your website in an attempt to game rank, and you'll be penalized; build spammy links to a competitors website, and we'll detect it and not let it hurt them." Well, to me, it doesn't seem like Google can have it both ways, can they? Really, I don't understand why Competitor A doesn't just go to Fiverr and buy a boatload of crappy exact match anchor links to Competitor B in an attempt to hurt Competitor B. Sure, Competitor B can disavow those links, but that still takes time and effort. Furthermore, the analysis needed for an unsophisticated webmaster could be daunting. Your thoughts here? Can Google have their cake and eat it too?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Web virus attack every second
Hello my wordpress has been constantly attacked every day, files were uploaded and redirections were made to others websites. I instaled sucruri pluggin paying the annual fee, and no result. They keep acessing the web. And i uploading backup security. Know i have instaled OSE wp firewall and seems that they are getting more dificulty accessing and uploading files. But still sending like 40 attacks every day. Is ther any way to stop this? were is some information of the blocked attacks LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:58:01 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/27.153.210.183 REFERRER: http://www.propdental.com/index.php?option=com_registration&task=register LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:52:09 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/2a00:1d70:c01c::69:61 URI: http://www.propdental.com/video//wp-admin.php FROM IP 40 attacks this ip every two seconds: http://whois.domaintools.com/2a00:1d70:c01c::69:61 URI: http://www.propdental.com/video//wp-admin.php ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:49:10 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/103.31.186.82 URI: http://www.propdental.com/ METHOD: GET LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:37:10 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/120.43.11.251 URI: http://www.propdental.com/blog/tag/carillas-de-porcelana-cerinate METHOD: GET USERAGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.95 Safari/537.11 REFERRER: http://www.propdental.com/blog/tag/carillas-de-porcelana-cerinate ACTION: Blocked LOGTIME: 2013-02-22 10:28:52 FROM IP: http://whois.domaintools.com/36.251.43.51 URI: http://www.propdental.com/ METHOD: GET USERAGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4 REFERRER: http://www.buyclassybags.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Francisco_Meza0