Aug 24, 22 | 5 min read
Reading time: 5 minutes
Remember when you were a kid and thought you got an amazing gift, but it was actually a pair of socks?
Well, the equivalent of that in the life of an SEO professional is opening Google Analytics, seeing an increase in organic traffic, and discovering that it was all a lie.
That's exactly what happened to us at Rock Content in early August.
Almost overnight, we started sierra leone email list receiving a lot of traffic from two places that never appeared in our rankings: Czech Republic and Seychelles.
After some research, we realized that this was happening with several other websites on the Internet. And then we concluded: the traffic was fake.
A sad story full of broken dreams and unfulfilled goals, right? But a story that brought valuable lessons for the whole team, and that I want to share with you now.
In this post, you'll learn how our investigation went and what to do when your site receives fake traffic.
How did Czech Republic and Seychelles come into our lives?
It all started on August 4th, when our US blog traffic (which had been steady throughout June) grew by 37% overnight.
By August 8th we were already receiving almost double the traffic compared to a day in June.
The first thing I did was identify the source of this traffic in the Acquisition Reports section of Google Analytics. Maybe it was a spike in paid traffic coming from some campaign. Maybe we went viral on social media, who knows?
But no, it was actually an increase in organic traffic. This already struck me as strange, because Rock Content has never behaved in such a volatile way.
Then I did something I usually do: I put “Country” as a secondary dimension in Analytics. And this was the result:
The United States has dropped out of first place as the country that most accesses our blog, losing its crown to two countries that had never appeared in our ranking.
The strangest was Seychelles, an archipelago in Africa with a population of less than 95,000 people that, ten years ago, had fewer than 2,000 Internet users, according to Wikipedia . If you like cartoons, it's close to Madagascar .
This intrigued us: how did a small archipelago that has tourism and fishing as its main economic activities suddenly become so interested in Digital Marketing?
The investigation continued...
Once I knew where the traffic was coming from, I needed to understand why.
First, I identified how traffic behaved in the Czech Republic and Seychelles from June to August . Was it a more or less natural growth, or something more like an explosion of sessions?
Looking at the percentages is enough to understand that the second option won:
This behavior also went against everything observed on the blog previously.
My next step was to identify the pages that were receiving the most traffic from these countries (with the help of the Behavior Reports section of Google Analytics).
The rankings were quite mixed, but some pages were getting more attention in both regions, such as our English posts on:
Affordable SEO Services
Best Digital Marketing Agency Websites
What is digital marketing?
Content Marketing Statistics
And that's when things got even stranger.
Despite gaining a lot of traffic, the most visited pages in Czech Republic and Seychelles had an incredibly high bounce rate. On top of that, the average session duration was practically non-existent.
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All of this pointed to the presence of bots on our site.
What I needed to know now was whether this attack was happening only with Rock Content or with other sites as well.
It's everyone's problem. But what's causing it?
A simple online search revealed to me that other people reported the same problem.
Source: Reddit
Some professionals shared possible causes on websites and forums, but the exact reason for the increase in organic traffic is unknown.
One hypothesis is that the affected sites are victims of a DDoS attack. Basically, it is a type of attack that consists of flooding a server with traffic to prevent users from accessing it.
Why? According to Kinsta , there are a few reasons, such as:
Your competitors could take down your website to steal your business while you're offline.
Perhaps the nature of your site's content is controversial enough that people want to block access to it.
Or maybe a company takes down their website to prove that their Internet service is better than yours.
While this hypothesis is valid, sites from different segments were affected in the same way. Therefore, it does not appear to have been a coordinated DDos attack with a specific intent.
This leaves us with the second hypothesis: it is a problem with Google Analytics itself , which for some reason is not able to filter out bots.
How did we come to this conclusion?
NameHero ran an interesting experiment to see how their traffic behaved in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and found that their numbers were pretty close to reality – in other words, the platform didn’t identify traffic coming from the Czech Republic and Seychelles.
So check your data in GA4. Maybe this is happening to you too.
