A Bot Found My Website
I religiously check Google Analytics, as well as several other metric checkers (my WA stas, Jaaxy stats, Google Webmaster, etc etc) to see how I'm doing and if I appear to be trending in the right direction.
Today I logged onto Analytics and was surprised to see a huge jump in traffic yesterday. (Almost 2000%!) This was seriously out of the norm and is on my newer site so I was pretty shocked and a fair bit skeptical.
Scrolling down, I saw that 98% of the traffic was 'Direct' which basically means Google Analytics cannot tell where it originated from. This of course caused my skepticism to increase...
I dug further into the reporting (they really have some awesome reports) and I can see that only 15% of that direct traffic actual visited a page for any amount of time. All other page hits have a duration of 0:00:00.
Obviously this is either a superhuman who flies through speed reading faster than a vampire, or it's an autobot. (My money's on the latter option)
Why did a bot visit my website? I have no idea. I did not send it, at least intentionally. But now it's skewing my metrics.
I'm disappointed it wasn't a sudden surge in true organic traffic, but I know that will come with time. :)
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Someone needs to figure out how to get rid of bots!!!! Well, at least the bad ones that cause havoc, not the search engine ones that give us good rankings.
Blessings,
Debby
I am hosted on WA and Site Protect is on. I did two things yesterday I initially thought could have triggered it:
1- I signed up for Pingdom to monitor my sites for outages/ server downs, etc
2- I went to that website one of our members posted about that evaluates your sites and tells you what it's "worth" (I don't remember exactly which site it was)
However, I did both of these things for both of my websites and only saw this fake traffic surge on one of them, so I'm not sure either is connected.
That's a very interesting coincidence all the same, I'd ask site support about it or especially Carson
where are you hosted, if at WA do you have site protect switched on in site manager?
if outside WA then there's a bunch of plugins you'd need
I still picked up a bot with one of my plugins for signing people's email...
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Thank you for sharing this information.
You're welcome :)