How to stop spam traffic

[tup]

Hi ALL!

hows it going!

I need some advice regarding spam traffic.

Every week at around 2-4am someone spams the site with around 250 hits. (250 hits direct to the homepage)

Everytime this happens all my GA stats dip.

is there a way to stop this?

Cheers ALL!

[nfint12]

If they are using the same IP range you could block that range in htaccess, otherwise something like cloudflare or wordfence may help.

[ddm]

is there a way to stop this?

https://support.google.com/analytics.../1034823?hl=en

[Former Member 14]

Every week at around 2-4am someone spams the site with around 250 hits. (250 hits direct to the homepage)

Are you sure it's not an automated Cron Job?
Going on your description, doesn't sound like spam...

[ddm]

Are you sure it's not an automated Cron Job?
Going on your description, doesn't sound like spam...

spam bots can be web-based / with temporal triggers too.. doing this stuff manually is a bore.

eg you might write a referral spam bot in php, using CURL to fake the referrer..
https://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-curl-http-referer/
and trigger it on a cron job.

[tup]

Thanks for all your feedback guys

I've looked in this further. they dont just target my homepage. what they do is they at random days always between 2-4am they open all my pages at the same time.

how do i in GA view the IP of that income traffic?

cheers all appreciate the help!

[ddm]

you won't be able to find that info. GA doesn't make it available in your reports due to privacy issues, and any collection of it is in violation of Google Analytics' Terms of Service. Please read Google's Analytics usage guidelines for clarification.

check your raw server logs.

[tup]

you won't be able to find that info. GA doesn't make it available in your reports due to privacy issues, and any collection of it is in violation of Google Analytics' Terms of Service. Please read Google's Analytics usage guidelines for clarification.

check your raw server logs.

Many thanks DDM, will have a check.

this has been happening for 4 months. every time around the 15th of the month

[yeahfree]

sorry for asking, but, why would you be willing to waste time on this? 250 is not a big number. i usually try to ignore spam, unless it really impacts something. can't imagine that 250 visits will give any impact at all.

[tup]

sorry for asking, but, why would you be willing to waste time on this? 250 is not a big number. i usually try to ignore spam, unless it really impacts something. can't imagine that 250 visits will give any impact at all.

You're right its not that much but it's something i would like to know how to deal with. And its a good topic for others to know

[Former Member 14]

spam bots can be web-based / with temporal triggers too.. doing this stuff manually is a bore.

eg you might write a referral spam bot in php, using CURL to fake the referrer..
https://www.electrictoolbox.com/php-curl-http-referer/
and trigger it on a cron job.

Thanks for assuming I'm a complete moron...

The OP specifically asked:

I need some advice regarding spam traffic.
Every week at around 2-4am someone spams the site

Sure I found it strange that the OP used "spam" instead of "bot", but hey, I just figure if your webmaster, then you'd know the basic terminologies. Hence, I took the OP's question literally, and replied to the question of "SPAM"....

If the OP had instead used "BOT" then I'd have answered in kind. But the OP didn't, instead he specifically stated "SPAM".

Besides, without the OP investigating the Raw Log Files (as I originally suggested), then no one can help him.

[ddm]

Thanks for assuming I'm a complete moron...

ummm...

I assumed The OP getting refferal spammed, by a bot.
you said it didn't sound like a bot, it did to me, and i gave a simple example to illustrate my point.

plus, many people on here aren't so technical so i find I tend to always give an example / code / link to helpful resources in an effort to add to the discussion.. sometimes I err, because I am human..

not sure why you would take it as an insult or personal attack.. neither were intended....

[ddm]

sorry for asking, but, why would you be willing to waste time on this? 250 is not a big number. i usually try to ignore spam, unless it really impacts something. can't imagine that 250 visits will give any impact at all.

back in the day, webmasters had publicly crawlable log files on a lot of setups / CMSes, so using referral spam was a way to get a link to your website..

tools such as reffy and prstorm were the tools of choice for such activities, as they were multi-threaded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam

#historylesson

[universal4]

It could be:

An seo wannabe that keeps pulling your website into an seo websites database (databasing your content using your bandwith and as you say affecting your stats - but not returning anything of value to YOU)

An seo wannabe that is using any one of a long list of bots (scraping your content using your bandwith and as you say affecting your stats - but not returning anything of value to YOU)

A compliance bot (databasing your content using your bandwith and as you say affecting your stats)

Certainly as others have said, if it is same time daily with the same patterns you should be able to determine who and what it is by the source IP and block the IP or subnet.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

If it's a bot - and they say so in their user string you you can probably deny it in .htaccess file ...

Something like this would work ...


RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(Google|msn|bing|facebook) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Bot) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

Basically it says if the user agent string doesn't have any of the four big network identifiers ... and it has the word bot then ban it.

[Former Member 14]

Certainly as others have said, if it is same time daily with the same patterns you should be able to determine who and what it is by the source IP and block the IP or subnet.

Agreed. As the OP states, this is happening every week (I'm guessing only 1 day a week) sometime between 2 - 4am. Could be a site monitoring service that the OP isn't aware of but has at some point signed up to.

One misconception which may need clarification (like the spam statement), 250 hits doesn't mean 250 visits.

Hits and Visits are completely different terminologies.

EG - if you have 5 images on a web page, that's considered as 5 hits, same goes for the HTML file itself. Add in CSS and JS which are also downloaded by the browser, and the "250 hits" could very well be diluted down to being only a couple of actual VISITS.

Given your site has oodles of images etc., etc. I think your getting worried about nothing.

Don't take this wrong way (everyone start somewhere)... Having a basic knowledge of webmaster terminology, including a basic understanding of server stats etc., etc., will help you avoid this sort of misdiagnosis in future

[yeahfree]

reminds me a little of my career in the IT sector in the past. had a phone call once that somebody's computer wasn't working. finally it appeared that the electricity cable was not plugged in... sigh.

OP states:
"Every week at around 2-4am someone spams the site with around 250 hits. (250 hits direct to the homepage)
Everytime this happens all my GA stats dip."

If you want our help, we will need more input:
- define hits, where do you see those hits, what info do you have on those hits
- explain what you mean with 'all my GA stats dip'

otherwise you will end up with getting 20 different answers to not asked questions.

[Former Member 14]

OP states:
"Everytime this happens all my GA stats dip."

GA stats shouldn't dip... Just outa interest tup, who are you hosting with, and what hosting is it?


Like yeahfree said, if we don't have all the facts and information, we can't really help you.

[tup]

Hi All

I appreciate the help! I'm a complete noob when it comes to this sort of stuff - looking back question was rather vague.

Basically for the last 4-5 months, on around the 15th of the month at random times. I see a huge spike in my GA stats.

I checked the access logs on where I'm hosted and What i can see is that someone/something opens up ALL my website pages then exits the pages.

Each time this happens its split between between2/3 IPS.

What i means when i said my GA stats dip is that stats like bounce rate (goes up) time on site goes down.

Its not a biggy but it would be nice for me to learn and understand these types of situations.

Hope that clears alot

thansk all!

[ddm]

so a traffic spike.. not a dip like you said at the start... makes sense..