-
Sudden spike in organic traffic stumping me
Posted by on February 25, 2021 at 3:35 amHi all,
I had a sudden spike in organic traffic to a particular blog page yesterday, and it has appeared to settle back down today. The spike is LARGE. This. page went from bringing in about 15-30 organic visitors a day to 17,000 yesterday and 900 today.While it is not unheard of for one page to get 17k organic visitors (it’s a pretty well established site) it is very weird for this page in particular. I am trying to figure out exactly what happened here. I have checked the following and am stumped:
– Traffic source is organic (bots would be direct or referral from my understanding)- Checked location of traffic for the past 2 days and there is no spike in traffic from a far away land- There was no mention of this article on a popular site/ by an influencer- Session duration is 39s, with 2.5 pages per session – if it were bots, the session duration would have been much lower- Ahrefs does show me that yesterday, this page suddenly started ranking for 300 new keywords, however, these keywords are low volume and the ranking is 50+ so this wouldn’t explain such a high increase.
I suspect this is bots, however, I can’t find the telltale signs that it is. Does anyone have any other insight or advice on how to figure this out?
EDIT: A quick edit here Re: GSC – I did take a look, and there is a big spike in impressions and clicks to a variety of keywords to this page. I’m starting to think perhaps something went viral regarding this topic which spiked up search interest
Thanks!
-
24 Replies
-
Have you checked GSC to see what you can dig up there? Impressions, clicks, queries, country and most importantly search appearance. Maybe its being picked up on Google discover.
See if you can slice up GA data by service provider to see if you can group them. Love to hear your findings
-
Did it get picked up by Discover or News?
-
Have you checked google trends to see if there was a spike in search volume for a keyword your page is about? Sometimes random things in the news cycle all of a sudden will cause a big spike.
-
Check for traffic from images or discovery.
-
I have never had something that extreme… but I have had big G rank a picture from a blog post up for something extremely high in traffic for a short period of time and had that sort of wild swing with unrelated traffic.
Did you make any extra $$ or get more leads?
-
Many of my clients had a similar impact. Sudden huge growth, It seems a small update for my sites.
Fingers crossed. Hope it remains the same.
-
Have you checked GSC?
-
Are you sure it’s coming from search engines? Just asking.
-
Maybe one of the terms that is typically low search volume, became highly searched for some reason?
For example, on one of my old blogs I had a review that ranked well when typing in “product name + review” but barely saw any traffic because people rarely looked up reviews of this item. Then one day the organic search traffic to that page went crazy. It turned out that the product was featured on good morning America with some sort of deal announcement to attachited . So then because of that feature, all sorts of people who were contemplating taking advantage of the sale, turned to the internet to look for reviews of the product first, causing my traffic to spike that day.
-
Would be also good to check device and browser version.
-
Have a look in Google’s Search Console under the Performance area. Find the page and have a look to see what queries your pages were showing for. Compare that to the previous days to see where the spike may have come from
-
Same here. we couldn’t find the source
-
I also feel like something happened that spiked interest in your field (e.g. celebrity tweeted something related to it, mentioned on a popular TV show etc. are just some possibilities); check news and Google Trends.
-
I had this happen before , twice actually but not 100% the same.
One day visitors went through the roof looked in referral and it was a bit url, where they sell you traffic. My thinking is they just blast stuff out , people look into it and buy the service.
Second time impressions went through the roof. We ranked number 1 for microwave and best microwave for 3 hours and got 30k impressions with 5 clicks so Google dropped us back down.
I couldn’t see if you said impressions were up, but I’d impressions weren’t up I’d assume bots unless there was some type of syndication or feature , but you said it is organic as far as federally type so you have to ask yourself other than a bot how would you get so many people finding the url without impressions going up?
And although it might look real bit traffic can behave like humans so bounce rate, time on page etc aren’t always best to eyeball bots but are usually helpful.
-
[removed]
Log in to reply.