How to stop spam traffic

[universal4]

Clearly a spider of some sort, your logs would tell you.

If you have the ip's, do a search for them and see if there are reports or any indication who or what is hitting the site regularly.

Rick
Universal4

[Azureus]

At least three possible explanations:

A) Googlebot or other search engine bot, in that case you should be able to identify them by useragent, block them by robots.txt. However these shouldn't appear in GA.

B) a crawler scanning random websites for vulnerabilities, check if it tries to access common pages such as wp-login.php because it may think you are running WP and you have a vulnerable version. These also probably shouldn't appear in GA.

C) a spy tool / bot checking your site because it is interesting for some reason. You should consider that a compliment.
Could be spying for outgoing links or displayed ads, then this data is aggregated in tools such as adplexity.
They can easily change useragent and IP so blocking it would be difficult. So if it is annoying for you to see spikes in GA, create a filter for that.

[Tanja53]

Log in to you ftpaccount and check that you have no strange folders like /xvys/.Recently i got a lot of strange traffic to one of my sites. Turned out that my ftp account had been hacked through filezilla. Traffic to your site can however never hurt your rankings.

[Former Member 14]

C) a spy tool / bot checking your site because it is interesting for some reason. You should consider that a compliment.
Could be spying for outgoing links or displayed ads, then this data is aggregated in tools such as adplexity.
They can easily change useragent and IP so blocking it would be difficult. So if it is annoying for you to see spikes in GA, create a filter for that.

What's the point in filtering this crap out???!!!
Instead, block the bastards...

First thing, block all cloud servers - this will stop the majority of nefarious bots, scrapers and what not. Also block TOR network too.

Secondly, and reiterating, block browser versions greater than 3 versions old. Every browser these days updates itself (unless it's some obscure browser). Doing this you can pretty sure you wont be blocking legit site visitors.

Anyway what would I know, only been an affiliate for 19 years...lol

[pnp]

Remove low quality backlinks

Independently of the type of spam, there are 3 things you always should do when you think you found one in your reports:

1. Never visit the suspicious URL. Most of the time they'll try to sell you something or promote their service, but some spammers might have some malicious scripts on their site.
2. This goes without saying, but never install scripts from unknown sites; if for some reason you did, remove it immediately and scan your site for malware.
3. Filter out the spam in your Google Analytics to keep your data clean.

[Lant]

perhaps parsing your site. Look at the logs and block access to the user agent / IP

[PROFRBcom]

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.

Looks a little something like this if you put it on an hourly graph?



Full Sized image link: https://i.imgur.com/RkVYFja.png

Traffic to your site can however never hurt your rankings.

I beg to differ. I have seen low quality traffic screw up rankings before and I am certain it plays a role in negative SEO when done maliciously.

[Former Member 14]

I am certain it plays a role in negative SEO when done maliciously.

I agreed, mate!
You and I my friend have been around for years, and we've seen ALL this before.

We, like other veteran-webmasters draw conclusion on our vast experiences.

[tup]

Hi All

Many thanks for the replies and feedback!

@PROFRBcom - your image is exactly what i see when this happens.
@AussieDave - how do i block out these bots? is a plugin required or can i do this via my hosting.

How long before i see a drop in search due to this?

many thanks again all!

[chorleynewman]

Hmm, this sounds well within the logic of a Screaming Frog SEO Spider, URL Profiler or some custom scanning tool. What does your analytics say? Any referrers, headers that you can see?

[PROFRBcom]

@PROFRBcom - your image is exactly what i see when this happens.

Yeah, I wish I could do something about it.
Unfortunately, using htaccess as others have stated isn't a posibility for me given how my site is hosted

The NGINX web server ignores distributed configuration files such as .htaccess for reduced resource consumption and increased efficiency

Hell, just finding the culprit in the log files is a giant PITA for me, notwithstanding that I can't do anything about it when found

[Mermaid]

Have you read about the new Google tags for links: user generated content and sponsored. I think this will be helpful further.

[Lloyd Richman]

I've had similar issues, but consistent traffic throughout the day. It's impossible for me to ecluse it from my Analytics because it's coming from lots of different countries/languages and server hosts. Whilts it's nice to see good numbers in website views It's killing my bounce rate. I think these crawlers are coming from in from Social Media posts. Any help or knowledge would be appreciated.