This is done in View > Filters > Add filter. You should check that Robot Filtering > Exclude all hits from known robots and crawlers is turned on in the settings, which can be found under View > View Settings.Īnother way is to filter out addresses that are the work of bots. There are two features in Google Analytics that can help you do this. How to avoid bots appearing in the results?īut there are ways for users to prevent this unwanted traffic. Visits will show up in analytics showing “pages” among the most visited pages on the site, such as: Most of this traffic is harmless to the site itself, but it can still mess up its analytics. The firewalls inside the server are able to block most of the bots’ rogue visits, but some still get through. During January 2021, the number of HTTP requests at Seravo has increased since December 2020, by almost three and a half hundred million requests (+15%), which also shows how active bots have become during first half of the year. These HTTP requests also include visits made by botnets. a user’s browser retrieves a specific image file. Seravo’s servers measure HTTP requests, which in practice means a single resource load on a web page, e.g. It is a botnet’s attempt to get a user to click on a link with the intention of increasing the number of visitors to another site, for example to improve its SEO performance. However, there is no cause for alarm, as similar activity has been common online in the past as well and is known as referral spam. These views for non-existent pages may emerge as the most visited pages on a website. The visitors appear to be accessing pages – even if they do not exist. But if they don’t, you can create a custom filter in the GA reporting screen to remove visits to this particular page.Many website users may have noticed that particularly active visitors have appeared in site’s analytics data. Google Analytics will probably find a way to block these guys. They’re showing that their product works, without actually harming anyone – except of Google Analytics’ credibility of course! What Can you Do About it? Not to mention that they’re sending this spam to potential customers, and they don’t want to DDoS their sites and piss them off! In fact, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper to do this instead of sending actually traffic to people’s websites. This shouldn’t be resource intensive at all. If I had to guess, I would say that the spammers are scraping your Google Analytics ID and using the GA code to execute the JavaScript and create fake traffic. Though it’s clear they wouldn’t mind being kicked off Google’s SERPS since they’re achieving their publicity through Google Analytics instead. So I guess their strategy is working?Įxcept I hope that Google doesn’t look too kindly on this kind of manipulation and penalizes them heavily. They’re hoping that people will write about it (like this article!), and retweet the problem (like Google’s John Mueller did). Their entire strategy is to spam thousands of websites with fake traffic to a fake page, so that it generates a lot of buzz. And yet Google Analytics was showing that it existed! And apparently, I wasn’t the only one. There was no real traffic my site to a non-existent page called “trafficbot.live”. The only 404s I got were from my own IP address when I checked to see if my site was hacked and if such a page actually existed. Even more surprising, my server registered no “404” pages that I would expect when someone tried to visit a non-existent page on my site. To my surprise, both of them showed nothing unusual! No spike in traffic of this magnitude that would explain the huge numbers I was seeing in Google Analytics. I accessed both my raw server logs, as well as the analytics on Cloudflare. Analysis: The Traffic Doesn’t Really Exist! I was surprised however, that my in-built firewall protections didn’t disable them before the count got so high. I have a number of tools to deal with these. Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”.
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