False traffic

[chaumi]

Every Thursday (and sometimes Weds night) I get hit by a bunch of visitors over a few hours. They look 'real'. Some stay on page for varying amounts of time. But they're all shown as 'direct traffic'. (the tool I use says if it's Google, Bing, Yandex, FB, whatever).

So I'm 99% sure this is false traffic and they're not 'real'. Maybe someone has something set up to auto-check page content/changes/ rankings. In which case, they're pi$$ing me off and if I knew a way to block them I would. But they're different IPs, from different countries. I'm not sure how to do it.

Anyone know precisely what this is?
And what (if anything) I can do about it?

[PaulEchere]

Have you checked this traffic on GA? Sometimes it might give more info on where it comes from. A little while ago I had a similar issue with "random" traffic on one of my websites and I found that it was generated by some "Buy Website Traffic at Wholesale Rates!" service (which I will not name) even though I have never heard of them and obviously never opted to use their services.

I guess your website doesn't have one / several preferred GEOs? Because if you do, then you can set up something like a catpcha challenge for all the other regions.

[wonderpunter]

Scrapers most likely, i get a lot of fake traffic.. what are you using to analyze?

[chaumi]

Scrapers most likely, i get a lot of fake traffic.. what are you using to analyze?

This is from afsanalytics (the free version). Been using it since day 1. Wouldn't recommend because it prob slows down pages, but I like it cos it's simple (but basic). Don't like GA, so for me it's a (just about) working alternative.

[AussieDave]

Scrapers most likely, i get a lot of fake traffic.

Agree.

99.999% of this crap, as well as other nefarious garbage, use outdated browsers (EOL), and fudge their UA metadata too.

There are ways to stop this sh#t at the front gate but it requires programming skills. My other suggestion is, a LOT of these scrapers and what not are coming from cloud-servers such as: cloudflare, azure, amazon and such.

Simplest way is to block these cloud servers in your htaccess file

I'm sure if you take to google you'll find some usable examples.

[newcustomeroffer]

If you're using wordpress then the Defender Pro plugin lets you block individual IPs very easily, plus it locks out any brute force attempts over a short period of time from the same IP address - worth a look if so.

[Oliver Cooper]

As I see it, this is a very common problem and there are a lot of options

[universal4]

Seo spiders, link spiders, we wanna see what our competition is up to spiders, site scrapers.

Then there are the site scrapers that put your sites in their database, (so that can compare etc etc even tho they took your site without permission) well now that your site is in their databases, sometimes available publicly, will also be scraped and scanned.

Oh yeah, many call them seo tools.

Rick
Universal4

[Joshstewart]

Sounds like scrapers we have had similar issues with traffic coming from some very strange places!