Do you keep in mind if you had been a child, you thought you had acquired an incredible reward, and it was truly a pair of socks?
Properly, the equal of that within the lifetime of an search engine marketing 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 the start 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 stuffed with damaged hopes and unfulfilled objectives, proper? However a narrative that introduced worthwhile classes to your entire crew — and that I wish to share with you now.
On this submit, 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 someday to the following.
On the eighth of August, we had been already getting virtually twice as a lot site visitors in comparison with a day in June.
The very first thing I did was determine 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 truly 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 manner.
Then I did one thing I all the time do: I put “Nation” as a secondary filter on Analytics. And this was the outcome:
The US left first place because the nation that the majority accesses our weblog, shedding its crown to 2 international locations 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 people who, ten years in the past, had lower than 2,000 web customers, in accordance with Wikipedia. In the event you like cartoons, it’s close to Madagascar.
This intrigued us: how does a small archipelago that has tourism and fishing and its major financial actions turn out to be so fascinated by Digital Advertising hastily?
The investigation continues…
As soon as I knew the place the site visitors was coming from, I wanted to grasp 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 classes?
Trying on the percentages is sufficient to perceive that the second choice gained:
This conduct additionally went in opposition to anything noticed on the weblog.
My subsequent step was to determine the pages that had been getting essentially the most site visitors from these international locations (with the assistance of the Conduct Reporting part of Google Analytics).
The rating was fairly assorted, however some pages had been getting extra consideration in each areas, like our posts about:
And that’s when issues received even stranger.
Regardless of gaining a variety of site visitors, essentially the most visited pages in Czechia and Seychelles had an extremely excessive bounce price. Moreover 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 cause 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 kind of assault that consists of flooding a server with site visitors to stop customers from accessing it.
Why? In line with Kinsta, there are some causes, equivalent to:
- 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 individuals 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 could have.
Though this speculation is legitimate, websites from completely different segments had been affected in the identical means. So it doesn’t seem to have been a coordinated DDos assault with a particular 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 cause.
How did we attain this conclusion?
NameHero did an fascinating 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 determine site visitors coming from Czechia and Seychelles.
So test your knowledge 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 (take a look at an instance on Mighty Gadget)
However there are additionally possibilities that this site visitors circulation 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 knowledge in SEMrush, it appears protected to say that the bots haven’t harmed our search engine marketing methods.
Lesson realized
What occurred was fairly weird and didn’t convey definitive solutions, nevertheless it made even clearer the significance of all the time analyzing knowledge 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, nevertheless it may be one thing utterly out of your management influencing your numbers.
So examine first, have fun later. That is the lifetime of an search engine marketing skilled.
Do you wish to proceed to be up to date with search engine marketing 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!
