Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed
-
For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site.
We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case.
It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off.
Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site.
(FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.
-
Just as EGOL describe it.
If you're on Amazon AWS then you can use their CloudFront as CDN. But also you can observe source of traffic. Could coming from one country, one IP range or one user-agent. There should be some kind of pattern and you should investigate it.
Then just need to make rule to block that traffic or just redirect them to one static "hello world" page.
I was also victim of such traffic, but was from humans trying to depleting an AdWords daily budget. Once budget it over ads was stopped showing, after few hours they recalculate clicks, some funds was returned, ads are shown again, they click it, budget is over... and so on.
-
By resetting your DNS to CF, your server is no longer used. All traffic is routed to one of CF's data centers and there are over 100 of them distributed throughout the world.
Also, in the CF settings, you want to "challenge" the visitors from problem countries. This will give them a captcha to complete. When they complete that captcha one time, you can then give them long term access without the challenge. CF will progressively become better at filtering the bots and allowing more trusted visitors in without a challenge.
-
Thanks for your help - this works to a large degree.
Have hit a new challenge though, our AWS servers are in one of these countries which are sending traffic. And we have multiple servers talking to each other enabling Login / other actions on the site.
While I have blocked all the other countries, blocking country with AWS servers is creating problem with Login. Trying to figure this out!
-
If you don't use Firewall, Cloudflare in your situation will have almost no effect.
We used our analytics to determine the countries where the traffic was coming from. Then went into CF FW.
Click the blue Help link for each tool to decide upon the settings that you want to try.
Here is what we used....
Security Level... Medium
Challenge Passage... one day
Access rules.... country name, challenge, this website
Impact of the above.... Many bots already recognized by CF will be blocked. Access rules will present each visitor from those countries a form similar to a captcha. They must pass the captcha to get in.
After you turn this on, watch your short term stats. You should see an increase in blocking.
We ran the above for a few weeks without any obvious SEO impact. Then switched our DNS back to normal, moving away from CF.... but kept the $20/month account and our settings in place. CF was time-consuming to set up.
-
This looks very similar to what we are seeing. We took CloudFlare as well - but stayed with Free account with "Site Under Attack" mode, which should force the visits to verify.
Will it be possible for you to share the settings on CloudFlare? Did you use their Firewall as well? Also, did you see any SEO impact, by any chance?
-
One morning, a few months ago we saw lots of mobile phone traffic building. All was hitting our homepage which is very resource intensive. All of this traffic generated one page view. All of the traffic was coming from a few countries in Asia and Africa. No referrer. Looked like a DDOS attack.
We go to Cloudflare, got a $20/month account, switched DNS to CF, forced untrusted visits from those countries to verify before allowing entry. Squeezed this traffic down to almost nothing within a few hours. Left CF run for a few weeks. Rouge traffic disappeared.
Now we have CF ready to go with all settings in place. Can turn it on in two minutes and have the shield in place as DNS propagates.
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
-
Need help with Robots.txt
An eCommerce site built with Modx CMS. I found lots of auto generated duplicate page issue on that site. Now I need to disallow some pages from that category. Here is the actual product page url looks like
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nahid
product_listing.php?cat=6857 And here is the auto generated url structure
product_listing.php?cat=6857&cPath=dropship&size=19 Can any one suggest how to disallow this specific category through robots.txt. I am not so familiar with Modx and this kind of link structure. Your help will be appreciated. Thanks1 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
SEO on page content links help
I run a website at the bottom we have scroller box which the old SEO guy used to contain all of the crap content so we can rank for keywords not on the page and put all of the links in to spread the link juice into the other inner category pages (some of these pages are only listed on our innerpages otherwise). We are trying to remove this content and add decent content above the fold with relevant long tail keywords in (it is currently decent but could do with expanding if we are removing this large chunk of text in theSEO box and some long tail keywords will be missing if we just remove it) we can add a couple of links into this new content but will struggle to list the category pages not on the left hand navigation. If we were to list all of the pages in the left hand nav would we dilute the power going to the main pages currently or would we be in the same position we are now? For example at the minute I would say the power is mainly going to the left hand nav links and then a small amount of power to the links in the SEO content if we put these into the nav will it not dilute the power to the main pages. Thank you for your time and hopefully your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Need help in Title tags
Hi I have word press site and it has 24 pages and the main keywords is Stairlifts there are various kind and type of stairlifts and all the 24 page has the title tag stairslifts , i have tried to make each unique but i cannot avoid using the keyword stairslift. Will that have a negative impact if my main keyword is stairlifts. My target page for stairlifts is the home page. Any suggestions please Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
What's the best way to manage content that is shared on two sites and keep both sites in search results?
I manage two sites that share some content. Currently we do not use a cross-domain canonical URL and allow both sites to be fully indexed. For business reasons, we want both sites to appear in results and need both to accumulate PR and other SEO/Social metrics. How can I manage the threat of duplicate content and still make sure business needs are met?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
One page wordpress site - what are the steps for SEO
Hello, I am launching 5 sites with keyword exact domains. I am developing the sites on wordpress as one page sales funnel sites. What do I need to do to optimize my sites? Really appreciate any bullet points or directions. Tks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmaher0