Spike in traffic from non-English countries. But doesn't feel like spam

[Hanuman]

Something weird's happening to my website the past week.

This site primarily caters to an American audience - although a lot of these brands are also sold elsewhere, the primary audience is the US (pre-May, the site had close to 80% US traffic).

From August 4 however, I am seeing a steady increase in traffic.

However, A LOT of these visits seem to be coming from Czech and Seychelles

I suspect it's spam since the search console is not registering an increase in traffic or impressions.

However, I have seen spam traffic before - it's like a sudden spike and hits a lot of irrelevant pages too - like category and tag pages.

In this case, however, the traffic is to all the regular pages. I am seeing an increase in sectional traffic (ex: /article#header1 ).

I thought it could be Bing or a local search engine, but I have tested the queries and they don't seem to be ranking there. Google Analytics says it's all from Google Search though.

I am at a loss to explain who are these people and why are they flocking suddenly to my site. Any test I can do to rule them as spam?

 

[Noisegen]

It’s bots, unfortunately. Many sites have been hit by this. I ended up blocking them in cloudflare, and that made the problem go away.

 

[Hanuman]

It’s bots

I want to block them too, but I really don't want to do that if they were legit visitors from Google.cz or something.

The only indicator here is the Avg. time on page shows 0 for this traffic (while it is over 5 mins otherwise). But I also suspect it could be lower because these people probably came in looking for Czech content and bounced when they see English.

-----

I noticed a notification on Cloudflare that they suspect it to be bot traffic as well. As of now, I have set up the 'Bot Fight Mode' option on.

Sigh, after the May Core Update, a part of me was hoping this to be the recovery I wanted. Looks like I am going to have to wait longer.

 

[Steptoe]

Yeah the Seychelles have been all over my sites too - I'm still not sure why, source or purpose of these bots. But considering the population of the Seychelles is below 100k I'm pretty sure each denizen has seen at least 1 of my pages

 

[Philip J. Fry]

Damn dude. You're desperate as fuck.

IDK what your site is or how it is monetised or what its purpose is but, usually, pure visitors is not a good metric to explain if your site's doing "well" or "poorly".

Visits from two weird islands who spend 0 seconds on site? spam.

If it were visits from two islands who spend 5-10 minutes on site, who goes 2-3 pages into the site, who bought shit, who signed up for a mailing list, who behaved like other human traffic, etc, then that's real "value". Plus you need to explain what they're doing there for your UX journey and marketing profile.

This isn't a marketing class but its quite obvious that those users (bots) didn't fit a marketing profile or a use case for the site. Good luck! You need.... luck. and maybe a few more attempts and some learning. This is quite harsh but, you're welcome!