Tracking unusual referred visitors

[PaulEchere]

Setting up captcha for Russian visitors seems to have stopped it actually.

[RedFoxLotto]

As a rumor spreads in some telegram chats, this negative traffic is driven by some big iGaming product. They are trying to kick off competitors from the market. Not sure if its 100% truth, rumors are rumors.

Did they say if they were targeting affiliate site and operators as well? That might explain the ongoing spam link building against my sales platform and then also against site linking to my platform.

[SlotAtHome]

We are experiencing exactly the same bot traffic from Russia. I don't know if it does any harm to our site, I guess, no, but it definitely messed up Analytics. It goes on for about 1-2 weeks. On the first day, the (bot) traffic was coming from all over the world, then only from Russia. What I could do was set a filter in Analytics to not show any traffic from Russia. I couldn't find out a better solution, but since then I'm happy.

By the way, it all started around that time when I refused some SEO Guru's offer. It might be some sort of revenge from them, but I'm not sure.

I don't think that it can hurt the site really. Anyone can buy bot traffic on the internet and send it on any site. If Google is so smart that it almost understands articles, then it should be smart enough to recognize false traffic too. And they should know that everyone can send bots for competitors.