Block irrelevant traffic & reduce bounce rate

[Schnell Solutions]

Having analysed our website traffic on Google Analytics, we can see a lot of irrelevant traffic from eastern countries. This traffic generally results in higher bounce rate, which I believe is am important factor Google considers for SERP.

For now, our target market in UK/EU only.

Any ideas/recommendations/experience on the best ways to block irrelevant traffic? We use WordPress along with a cache plugin to speed-up the website.

Thanks.
Jignesh

 

[webgeek]

You could use Cloudflare and block them at the CDN/DNS stage.

Or, you could use IQBlockCountry or IP2Location-Country-Blocker which are specifically designed for this occasion (and easily found by searching the web for 'Wordpress block by country').

Alternatively, Wordfence has this capability within, so if you use it anyway, which many people do, it can do this as well.

If you'd like to block the traffic before it gets to the application level and gets Wordpress firing to handle the request, you could block via server firewall such as within whm/cpanel, or an external web app firewall/firewall as a service such as Dome9 (using IP ranges primarily).

If you'd like to keep out the hackers as well as the unrelated traffic, then using something that handles the request before Wordpress ever sees it would be ideal. If you're on shared hosting or otherwise cannot implement the server/dns side firewalling, you probably would do well to just use a Wordpress plugin approach.

 

[NewGardenStyle]

This interesting as I've been getting a lot of referral spam that is playing havoc in analytics. Traffic that bounces at 100% with 0.00 page view time. I've been reading up about it but it's all quite complex for me to get my head around.

 

[webgeek]

Sometimes it's uptime monitors, other times competitors using a black hat bounce rate attack with proxied IP's, and still others - who knows?? (PPC click fraud trying to deplete your budget is one common case)

 

[Websitehandyman]

At the moment google reports are suffering from ghost referrals so I would not worry about it too much. You can always filter them out of the reports but bare in mind any blocking you do on your website also has a knock on effect, might slow down access or use resources. I should think we are getting to the point where some hosting companies will offer segmented hosting blocking all traffic from china and other places if you don't need it. My firewalls block around 300 attempts from china a day.

 

[NewGardenStyle]

Ghost referrals appears to be what I'm suffering with, it's an annoyance and seems quite widespread. I tried a referral exclusion list but apparently that doesn't work

 

[Websitehandyman]

Ghost referrals appears to be what I'm suffering with, it's an annoyance and seems quite widespread. I tried a referral exclusion list but apparently that doesn't work

The is nothing you can do to prevent them but you can, if you want and have the time to, filter them out of the reports. Look out for a warning from Google saying you are self-referring. Just ignore it as even if you were it would afect your google ranking.

 

[Mystro]

Be careful as you could block legit traffic too, sometimes you have to remember that you are looking at a stat (bounce rate) and really how relevant is this to you unless its slowing down your server then there is not really an issue, as then you may start looking at alexa traffic rating and wonder why thats dropping its because you blocked the amount of visitors to your site, I know someone that blocked all traffic from outside the UK and inadvertently blocked crawlers from accessing their site

So look at the reason why you want to do this but do your research first, if you never monitored it you would never know i suspect

 

[Palani Kumar]

You can simply block the traffic from any specified country, alternatively you can increase relevant traffic to match the bounce ratio.

 

[Schnell Solutions]

Thank you all. One of the problem with using WordPress caching plugins is that none of them (as far as I know) are compatible with Geo/Country blocking plugins. If you install them, you run the risk of blocking genuine users.

What I have done currently is to block the IP range using the MaxMind DB via the web server. This allows me to abort the request before it even hits the website. The only issue here is keeping this DB up-to-date. So was wondering if there is a better way of doing this.

I have tried WordFence plugin but it slows the website down.....as its been recommended here I will activate it again and see if we can identify the performance issue it is throwing at us.

 

[CraigGriffiths]

A lot of it is fake referrals and they aren't actually visiting your site.

As i'm unable to post links yet, search in Google for "google referral spam" and go to the post on the website called analyticsedge.

It's probably the best post i've seen on the matter.

 

[Schnell Solutions]

I almost daily hits on the home page of my website from USA, Ashburn, Virginia from an IP range of 54.* They always land on the home page and then no interaction takes place....messes-up the bounce rate.

Upon further investigation, these IPs belong to Amazon AWS....if anyone here has any knowledge of this....I would be great to learn more on what/why/how about this hits

 

[RealEcon]

Analytics Ghost Offenders:

free-share-buttons.com
best-seo-offer.com
buy-cheap-online.info
buttons-for-your-website.com
www.Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com
best-seo-solution.com

 

[altonroot]

This traffic generally results in higher bounce rate, which I believe is am important factor Google considers for SERP.

First I would like to clear your misconception. Bounce rate was neither a ranking factor in past nor it is today. So don't worry about that. Just for you analysis, you can exclude those fake traffic data for better judgement in measuring success of various channels.

 

[SEO Lady]

Does this include bots like
Semalt
Buttons-For-Website
etc?

I found the perfect resouces online and combined them into one long blog post last month.
Your comments are welcomed

http://ninagreaves.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/block-semalt-buttons-for-website-with.html