![]() ![]() 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. If something goes wrong, your website will go down.Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”. Backup of your htaccess file before you edit it.Test these filters in your “Test” View of your Google Analytics Property.Note: Request URI = ‘Page’ Dimension in Google Analytics Warning (Before You Add the Filter Exclusions) *trafficbot.*|.*traffic-bot.*|.*bot-traffic.*|.*bottraffic.* to your exclusion filter (below include all periods) htaccess file to exclude these Request URI’s. Long-Term Solution: Keep fighting Google Analytics Spam by asking your development team to add this filter in your GA Property Filter settings or use your CDN or. Under “Conditions”, add an exclusion filter for “Browser Size” by (not set) to hide the bot traffic.Temporary Solution: If you need to review data in January-February 2021, review the screenshot below to create an advanced segment in your e Analytics properties excluding this bot traffic. Solutions to Bot Traffic Spike in Google Analytics Since filters are not retroactive, your organic traffic will be skewed in January-February 2021 without setting up a Google Analytics Advanced Segment to hide this bot traffic from reporting. Temporary Impact on Your Google Analytics Data (GA) *trafficbot.*|.*traffic-bot.*|.*bot-traffic.*|.*bottraffic.* into the search box’s regex to find this bot traffic.Īlthough most of our Google Analytics properties have the “Filter for Known Bots” selected, as well as custom spam filters set up by Overdrive and development teams, spam is a constant challenge for web analytics platforms. In your Google Analytics Property, navigate to Behavior à Site Content à Landing Pages, and you may see an uptick in traffic based on the bottraffic/trafficbot anomaly. Did this Impact My Google Analytics? How Did This Happen? On January 31, Google Analytics accounts were hit with a large spike classified as a “landing page” (coming from Google) from one of these four referrals:Īlthough Google’s anti-spam team fixed the initial spike on January 31, Overdrive is still seeing bot traffic on February 2-3, 2021.
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