Avoiding negative SEO attacks

[MrAJ]

Hey guys,
each day a lot of my sites are attacked by some negative SEO tactic that is nothing else than sending a few hundred vistitors from one single country. They immediately bounce. I assume this idiot wants to worsen user metrics this way. All visitors come directly and from different countries but all the same IP. One day it's UK, then Sweden, then Ireleand, etc. So I can't just block these countries nor the IPs. Does anybody have experience with these attacks and knows a solution for it?
Cheers

[nfint12]

This sounds like a small scale ddos attack, I've been subject to plenty over the years and what worked for me was signing up to cloudflare, then if they attacks got bad/had an effect on site performance I'd switch the security level to something higher (as here).

Worked for me, so hopefully it'll work for you too.

[MrAJ]

Cloudflare is really an easy solution that has not come to mind yet. Will give it a shot if it helps in these cases as well.

[nfint12]

Ye try the free version first sure, and then if needs be upgrade.

[Malikbhai]

Are you new to this or what.

These things are as common for websites as a fridge is to a kitchen.

[Michael Martinez]

Hey guys,
each day a lot of my sites are attacked by some negative SEO tactic that is nothing else than sending a few hundred vistitors from one single country. They immediately bounce. I assume this idiot wants to worsen user metrics this way. All visitors come directly and from different countries but all the same IP. One day it's UK, then Sweden, then Ireleand, etc. So I can't just block these countries nor the IPs. Does anybody have experience with these attacks and knows a solution for it?
Cheers

Bounce rate doesn't affect general Web search rankings. It's only used in personalized search results. It's not going to hurt your SEO directly but if the traffic ties up server resources like TCP connections or CPU time it could make your site run slower.

If the traffic is all hitting the same URL then look for a pattern in the user agent strings. You might be able to block or filter the traffic based on that.

Usually these botnets come from server farms so you could look up the CIDR ranges assigned to the Web hosting companies and block those. However, there are some companies that pay smartphone users for access to their Internet connections. They sell those connections to people who want to run crawlers from random IP addresses. Those hits are hard to block because they all come from legitimate cellular networks.

If the traffic isn't hurting performance then don't worry about it ... for now.

[casinoportal]

It's just bot traffic, it can be a pain as they also click through all your links and generate fake clicks to affiliate programs. This makes it difficult to dertermine your true conversion rate. If you using WP then 1 program that will vastly reduce it is called Blackhole for Bad Bots, since I installed that I have seen a 95% drop in bot traffic.

[TheGooner]

All visitors come directly and from different countries but all the same IP. One day it's UK, then Sweden, then Ireleand, etc. So I can't just block these countries nor the IPs.

These are bots

[MrAJ]

Are you new to this or what.

These things are as common for websites as a fridge is to a kitchen.

What a helpful response, you should be proud of yourself!

So far I just did not worry because of what Michael Martinez said. However, it can't hurt taking care of it before causing any trouble. At least the standard Cloudflare won't do the trick in this case.

Will try the Blackhole plugin as well. Thanks for the hint.

[Ninja16]

I tried to explain in another thread.

https://www.gpwa.org/forum/how-get-r...ic-252387.html

Hope help for you

[baldidiot]

If it’s coming from the same IP in batches then you could also set a limit to the number of requests from an IP. Eg: 10 requests in a minute and you ban the IP for 24 hours.

[onlinebestca]

If these are just bots (do not emulate the user's behavior) and they come to the site with an empty referrer, then there is no reason to worry. If you want to insure everything, close access to your site from all non-target regions at the Cf level.