Huge increase in direct traffic to our site in the last four days with a high bounce rate

[simonswords]

We've got some healthy competition around the terms we're trying to rank for, so I'm concerned one of our competitors is doing something to impact our rankings. Before I put my tinfoil hat on...I 'd like a sanity check please!

A few days ago we shot up to number 3 on google.com for "hr software". Previously we were hovering around 30th for that term. At the same time traffic to our site tripled. I did 2 + 2 and got 4, thinking that we'd been awarded with higher serps by our google overlords, and this explained the traffic.

The next day our ranking for that keyword went back to normal but the traffic kept flowing in...

Fast forward four days to today, our rankings for all keywords have dropped across the board but the traffic is still rolling in. On further investigation 82.5% of this traffic is from IE 7.0 and of that traffic 99.73% bounced! It feels to me like we've got some kind of bot (all the visits are from different IP addresses) hitting our site, and leaving immediately, as this would explain the fact that all visits register as IE 7.0 and have almost 100% bounce rate.

Has anybody seen this before? Happy to share any other stats and Google Analytics info if it helps solve this mystery!

 

[wearewattle]

Are the visits all from Google? Have you looked at the referring sources? If it is from Google look at a site called ahrefs and see if any new inbound links have been created that might have caused the jump.

 

[simonswords]

Hey @wearewattle the visits are registering as direct traffic, or in other words, not searches or referred from another website.

 

[wearewattle]

"direct" traffic can still be a referral, google is getting worse on this front - check ahrefs for recent inbound links - it can also be as a result of a link within an email, what country is the traffic from?

 

[directmarketingadvice]

Do you have a wordpress site?

 

[simonswords]

"direct" traffic can still be a referral, google is getting worse on this front - check ahrefs for recent inbound links - it can also be as a result of a link within an email, what country is the traffic from?

All of the traffic is IE 7.0, on various operating systems, and showing as coming from the US but different networks/IPs in the US.

 

[simonswords]

Do you have a wordpress site?

Our blog is wordpress (www.staffsquared.com/blog) and the marketing site is static.

 

[Bill1954]

We are experiencing the same thing. I first noticed on Google analytics that there seemed to be a lot of USA visitors on the site. My web dev checked the Woopra account and it shows the same thing, massive direct traffic from the states, hitting the home page and bouncing straight off again.
Will this high bounce rate affect our rankings ?
Our site is built on Magento

 

[simonswords]

We are experiencing the same thing. I first noticed on Google analytics that there seemed to be a lot of USA visitors on the site. My web dev checked the Woopra account and it shows the same thing, massive direct traffic from the states, hitting the home page and bouncing straight off again.
Will this high bounce rate affect our rankings ?
Our site is built on Magento

Are all of your hits showing as Internet Explorer 7.0 too? If so you've got exactly the same issue as we're experiencing.

I've spent a bit of time on this, and here's my understanding to date:

• Google use hundreds (potentially thousands) of factors to rank a site, bounce rate may be one of them, but definitely isn't the be all and end all
• For wordpress there's a plugin called Brute Force (Not sure if there's a Magento equivilent)
• I ran the IP addresses of the hits we're getting through NMAP. The common port that was open was 49152 on 27 different machines. That was it. muTorrent uses that port so again... this leads me to think that the owners installed something and clicked too many buttons and installed something.

Check to make sure your Google webmaster tools aren't showing any errors or problems. Also check to make sure your site still performs well on a speed test because that is a serious ranking factor.

Ultimately this thing is more annoying than troublesome, and nothing to write home about.
his type of stuff happens all the time. Nothing to write home about.

 

[ZeroDouble]

If the traffic is bouncing back to the SERPs then it could actually be more of a serious problem than you think, as such a metric can (supposedly) trigger a panda penalty.

Is there no way that you cant just block their IP ranges in .htaccess?

Also, the anchor text ratios of your IBLs are way over-optimised for the main term that you're targeting - you should probably look at doing something about that?

 

[simonswords]

If the traffic is bouncing back to the SERPs then it could actually be more of a serious problem than you think, as such a metric can (supposedly) trigger a panda penalty.

Is there no way that you cant just block their IP ranges in .htaccess?

Also, the anchor text ratios of your IBLs are way over-optimised for the main term that you're targeting - you should probably look at doing something about that?

The traffic is generated by malware that people have inadvertently installed on their machines (think IE toolbars and the like). As a result there's no one range, the traffic is from all over the US.

What makes you say that about our IBLs?

 

[ZeroDouble]

Fair enough, probably impossible to block them using .htaccess then - was just an idea.

I mentioned your IBLs because you've got an extremely high percentage of them with your main term as an anchor.

 

[simonswords]

All ideas gratefully received! As it stands, I'm currently in the process of hunting down the network that's behind this traffic Liam Neeson style. When I found out who it is, they'll feel some wrath

 

[simonswords]

I think it may be automated visits....please check with the visitors' IPs..

It is definitely automated visits...that much we do know. The IPs are from various network service providers all over the US. The only common denominator about the visitors is that they all bounce, and they all purport to use IE 7.

 

[ZeroDouble]

lol, fair enough mate - happy hunting!

As a parting gift - it also might be an idea if you included your main keyword in the first paragraph of your page (at the moment it doesn't appear once in your entire body copy).

Anyway, good luck.

 

[simonswords]

lol, fair enough mate - happy hunting!

As a parting gift - it also might be an idea if you included your main keyword in the first paragraph of your page (at the moment it doesn't appear once in your entire body copy).

Anyway, good luck.

Thanks I'll check that out. We also need to sort out our Text/HTML ratio on the home page as it's currently too low so I'll combine your feedback with that change

 

[Bill1954]

It almost looks like some kind of botnet but I just don't see why someone in the US would target a small Uk bathroom company

 

[altonroot]

Hey, bounce rate is not a ranking factor as Matt Cutts has said is so many times. So don't worry on that part. There is simple reason behind the logic is if someone is looking to find birthday of David Beckham, he/she doesn't look any page if they got on result page itself. And that doesn't prove it the website is bad.
You are getting many direct or referral visits. This has happened to me. After analysis of back-links in webmaster I found that there is problem from server side. By mistake of technical issue, few websites resides on the same server 302 redirecting to my website. So those who are looking for those website accidentally falling on my website. So bounce rate increase is also justifiable. This has happened to me. You can check for the same.

 

[vandenhoek]

Thank you for this topic! I have been searching for hours to find out what is going on with my website and you seemed to have described it exactly as it is happeing to me.

Huge amount of traffic from different ip-addresses with no referral what so ever and a 100% bounce rate.

Submitted a ticket with Google Adwords/Analytics, but they could not find anything yet.

If anyone knows what to do I would be very much obliged.

Regards and have a great day!

 

[Bill1954]

Hmm, while this was happening this morning I checked the IP's of online customers in Magento. Strangely enough, while GA has them being in the states, Magento was giving them all an IP address in the Netherlands, in fact it was the IP of our hosting company. This is getting weird but a quick Google told me that there are hundreds of sites experiencing the same thing

 

[vandenhoek]

Hi Bill,
What hosting company does this concern? I would like toi check this, as all my weird ip-addresses route to USA.

 

[Bill1954]

It's Digital ocean in the Netherlands

 

[senses]

You have most likley had your Wordpress compromised. We have seen this many times before, often around the timthumb lib.

Get your host to run a few scans for knowns, however this might not pick up anything.

As a quick role call:
- Make sure your install is up to date
- Make sure you have no admin with the username 'admin'
- Make sure you have very strong passwords (e.g. fds&*hjkhK98y&yhHHiouoIH3)
- Make sure all plugins are up to date, and unused ones removed (inc files)
- Remove un-used themes
- Make sure your admin login is limited or run capacha.

I would also:
- Backup your database
- Backup your theme
- Export your wordpress content (using the export tools)
- Remove the wordpress install completely
- Install clean
- Restore DB and theme.
(before people rant, this wont remove the hack in many cases, but its a quick non harm thing)

Depending on the size of your site, consider the manual process of backing up text from the site into your favourite editor. If found bad, hosts can have the habit of 'just deleting stuff'.

If you need any more help feel free to PM

 

[yottacom]

Will this high bounce rate affect our rankings ?
Our site is built on Magento

Hardly, it's probably machine-generated traffic.
It may indirectly affect the performance of your hosting, making it looks like the website is slower.

 

[yottacom]

You have most likley had your Wordpress compromised. We have seen this many times before, often around the timthumb lib.

i disagree, the problem is not an on-site violation, it's probably the effect of a massive scraping activity.

 

[yottacom]

Thanks I'll check that out. We also need to sort out our Text/HTML ratio on the home page as it's currently too low so I'll combine your feedback with that change

Hey Simon,

it's strange to think that they are bot: most crawlers emulate browsers, but they cannot trigger google analytics.

option 1:

I've seen it happen when the entire content of a website is scraped and published on another website (including the original analytics code).

Try to check the "hostname" as secondary dimension. if you see a website that it's not yours, somebody has cloned it.

Option 2:

check the browser resolution of those visits. It may shed some insight.

 

[BristolRemovals]

Its robots.

 

[Bill1954]

Interestingly enough, this traffic stopped yesterday at about 10am and we haven't seen any traffic from the states since.
Just like someone had hit the off button.

 

[Openeye]

Looks like the problem has been identified as Adroll. Ive seen the same windows 7 direct traffic issue with 2 sites and both use Adroll. http://www.seroundtable.com/adroll-invalid-traffic-18922.html

 

[SatSindhar]

Keep an eye on your google webmaster tools account

 

[jasonwebb71]

When you mentioned Digital Ocean, it rang a bell, not because I've had the same traffic problems, but because I noticed it popping up in my tracking.

It popped up every time I submitted a Facebook ad for approval, and the referring URL was always a Facebook one. I believe, in my case, that it was somebody working for Facebook approving the landing page that I've posted in my ad. They had 4 different IP addresses all the same day, but were always coming from Digital Ocean in New York.

Have any of you been doing anything with Facebook Ads that could have got your URL involved with Digital Ocean in some way?

Regards

Jason

 

[StevePoster]

I think its called bot hits traffic and using this kind of massive traffic is usually trying to make their site natural to SE.

 

[branddesignexperts]

Check the website compatibility with IE7. Also check the location from where the traffic is coming from. If majority of the traffic is from the same location then I would suggest to restrict that IP.

 

[Karen Bennett]

I've recently called the help line a few times in relation to adwords, google business accounts and a few other things. Try call them - they are trying to be more helpful - 0800 169 0409