Do you keep in mind whenever you had been a child, you thought you had acquired a tremendous reward, and it was really a pair of socks?
Properly, the equal of that within the lifetime of an website positioning skilled is opening up Google Analytics, seeing a spike in natural site visitors, and truly discovering it was all a lie.
That’s precisely what occurred with the Rock Content material weblog at first of August.
Virtually in a single day, we began to obtain an enormous quantity of site visitors from two locations that by no means appeared in our rankings: Czechia and Seychelles.
After investigating, we realized that this was taking place with a number of different web sites on the web. After which we concluded: the site visitors was faux.
A tragic story filled with damaged hopes and unfulfilled targets, proper? However a narrative that introduced priceless classes to your complete group — and that I wish to share with you now.
On this publish, you’ll find out how our investigation went and what to do when your website receives faux site visitors.
How did Czechia and Seychelles come into our lives?
It began on August 4th, when the site visitors on our US weblog (which remained fixed all through June) grew 37% from sooner or later to the following.
On the eighth of August, we had been already getting nearly twice as a lot site visitors in comparison with a day in June.
The very first thing I did was establish the supply of this site visitors within the Acquisition Reporting part of Google Analytics. Perhaps it was a spike in paid site visitors coming from some marketing campaign. Perhaps we went viral on social media, who is aware of?
However no, it was really a spike in natural site visitors. This already struck me as odd, as a result of Rock Content material‘s weblog site visitors has by no means behaved this fashion.
Then I did one thing I all the time do: I put “Nation” as a secondary filter on Analytics. And this was the consequence:
The USA left first place because the nation that almost all accesses our weblog, dropping its crown to 2 nations that had by no means appeared in our rankings.
The strangest factor was Seychelles, an archipelago in Africa with a inhabitants of lower than 95,000 those that, ten years in the past, had lower than 2,000 web customers, in response to Wikipedia. Should you like cartoons, it’s close to Madagascar.
This intrigued us: how does a small archipelago that has tourism and fishing and its main financial actions develop into so considering Digital Advertising hastily?
The investigation continues…
As soon as I knew the place the site visitors was coming from, I wanted to know why.
First, I recognized how site visitors in Czechia and Seychelles behaved from June to August. Was it a roughly pure progress, or one thing extra akin to an explosion in periods?
Wanting on the percentages is sufficient to perceive that the second choice gained:
This habits additionally went in opposition to anything noticed on the weblog.
My subsequent step was to establish the pages that had been getting essentially the most site visitors from these nations (with the assistance of the Conduct Reporting part of Google Analytics).
The rating was fairly diverse, however some pages had been getting extra consideration in each areas, like our posts about:
And that’s when issues obtained even stranger.
Regardless of gaining plenty of site visitors, essentially the most visited pages in Czechia and Seychelles had an extremely excessive bounce fee. In addition to that, the common session length virtually didn’t exist.
All this pointed to the presence of bots on our website.
What I wanted to know now was if this assault was taking place solely with Rock Content material or with different websites as properly.
It’s everybody’s downside. However what’s inflicting it?
A easy on-line search revealed to me different folks reporting the identical downside.
Some professionals shared doable causes on web sites and boards, however the actual motive for the spike in natural site visitors is unknown.
One speculation is that the affected websites are victims of a DDos assault. Principally, it’s a sort of assault that consists of flooding a server with site visitors to forestall customers from accessing it.
Why? Based on Kinsta, there are some causes, resembling:
- Your opponents might take down your web site to steal enterprise from you while you’re offline.
- Maybe the character of the content material in your website is controversial sufficient that folks wish to block entry to it.
- Or perhaps an organization takes down your web site to indicate that the web service they provide is best than the one you have got.
Though this speculation is legitimate, websites from completely different segments had been affected in the identical method. So it doesn’t seem to have been a coordinated DDos assault with a selected intent.
This leaves us with the second speculation: it’s a downside of Google Analytics itself, which is unable to filter the bots for some motive.
How did we attain this conclusion?
NameHero did an attention-grabbing experiment to see how their site visitors was behaving in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and located that its numbers there have been fairly near actuality — in different phrases, the platform didn’t establish site visitors coming from Czechia and Seychelles.
So examine your information on the GA4. Perhaps that is taking place to you too.
Czechia and Seychelles: what to do with all of the faux site visitors?
Essentially the most talked about resolution on-line is to dam the faux site visitors utilizing Cloudflare.
There are stories of individuals utilizing this service and seeing site visitors from Czechia and Seychelles being stopped (try an instance on Mighty Gadget)
However there are additionally probabilities that this site visitors move will finish naturally. That’s what occurred to us on the sixteenth of August:
No matter the issue was, it may very well be that Google has already fastened it.
And fortunately, after analyzing our information in SEMrush, it appears secure to say that the bots haven’t harmed our website positioning methods.
Lesson realized
What occurred was fairly weird and didn’t convey definitive solutions, but it surely made even clearer the significance of all the time analyzing information in depth.
When site visitors spikes happen, it’s greatest to be suspicious and maintain again the joy.
It may very well be that your content material plan is paying off, positive, but it surely is also one thing fully out of your management influencing your numbers.
So examine first, rejoice later. That is the lifetime of an website positioning skilled.
Do you wish to proceed to be up to date with website positioning greatest practices? I strongly recommend that you simply subscribe to The Beat, Rock Content material’s interactive publication. There, you’ll discover all of the traits that matter within the Digital Advertising panorama. See you there!
