Spammy traffic
-
Hi guys! There has been an unusual amount of traffic to one particular page on our blog. Now that the business is slow, I had the time to look into it. Half of that traffic is coming from India and we are a Chicago based limo service. We 'll skip why that happens part for now.
I let Hotjar record 100 session and upon reviewing them I have noticed a lot of sessions with no interaction, no mouse movement, no clicks; just scroll and exit. My question is related to implementing a type of verification (captcha) for that blog page to see if the bots / behavior changes.
Are there any downside in terms of in page SEO for this type of implementation?
What is good practice for something like this? -
This is usually spam related traffic. Nothing you can do about but their goal is to spam either your guestbook, comment section or contact forms. Make sure it's well protected. These spam comments could run into the hundreds a day if you dont properly protect your website.
It's the number one reason why i dislike using wordpress in the first place. You gotta dedicate 5 plugins at least for security, spam and other things before having it running. And spammers do change tactics. Wordpress sites are being attacked all the time. Pretty much 60 to 80% of traffic on blogs are garbage.
-
My two cents, just let it go. There is likely downside to 'hiding' your content behind a captcha just to see if the traffic is real or not. Especially as it could be something that is hurting SEO as you're loading another script to the page. In the end, what's the downside of having a ton of traffic going to a page, maybe a few extra dollars in server costs but usually I haven't seen any other issues.
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
-
Since implementing GDPR, has anyone seen website traffic plummet?
On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Jason_Taylor0 -
Why is Indeed.com traffic appearing as organic in Google Analytics?
A large number of sessions in my client's Google Analytics account appear to come from medium: organic and source:Indeed. Since I'm focused on SEO for this project, I'd prefer that Indeed be treated as referral traffic. Any ideas for fixing this issue? Also, and I'm sure the answer is no, is there a way to fix the past data in Google Analytics that has already reported Indeed as an organic medium?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P0 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Whats (Other) traffic in Google Analytics?
When I look through all our clients, a few are receiving the majority of their traffic from (other). [ Acquisition > Channels > (Other) ]. The only option in (other) is "website" or "offline", whatever that may be. And even weirder, the avg session duration is 0:00. Any idea what this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | W2GITeam0 -
Drop in direct traffic
Hi, I help look after two websites and have been tracking traffic sources for a couple of years. I have noticed that both sites have seen a drop in direct traffic over 2 years. Has anyone else noticed this and do you have a hypothesis as to the reason? Overall, on both sites traffic has increased. Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Number of clicks / organic traffic - different data in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Hi. I have a little problem. When I open Google Webmaster Tools I see 3000 clicks (in Traffic - Search queries - Clicks). But when I open Google Analytics I see much more visits from search engine (Google) - it´s 4-5 times more! It´s a huge difference, don´t you think? Do you know, where is the problem? What causes this diffence? thanks a lot
Reporting & Analytics | | mysho0 -
Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update. However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic! Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all. We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic. We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them. Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | atticus70 -
URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
Hey people, I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Reporting & Analytics | | dumperama
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user) Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP. But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month. Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords. You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped. So I'd like to know if you observed similar results. Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago? Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though. All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise... I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!0