Green Light or Stop Sign? Analyze and Control Website Traffic

If you've just built your first website, the number of visitors is very important as it indicates how well your SEO efforts are working. You expect the number to slowly rise as you build links and market your content, but is a major spike in traffic a cause for celebration? Probably not, if you dig deeper into your analytics data. A massive spike in traffic, where each visitor only spends one second on your site, makes your bounce rate go up drastically. Something is wrong.

Check where the traffic is coming from; if it is from organic searches, see if you've moved up in the SERPs, A surge of new, direct traffic, however, is a problem, especially when your website is new. Could 2,000 people have heard of your site via word of mouth and all of them decided to visit your site yesterday? The answer is no.

Check to see is the majority of the suspicious traffic originates from the same city. If it does, you are the victim of a bot attack. Check the city that these hits are coming from, you can block the city from your analytics data. This works best if you have a local website that does not expect to ever get traffic from that city. There are other ways to block the traffic from showing up in your data, such as blocking an IP address.

Once you've got your analytics under control, you should find out why there spam bots are visiting your website. They may be adding a comment with a link for their weight loss product; a captcha won't stop them. They may also be looking for vulnerabilities that will let them access your site to steal customer information.

If this is your first website and it is import to you, learn how to block the spam bots manually and make sure there are no vulnerabilities to exploit.