Sudden spike in organic traffic stumping me

[Mank15]

Why bot traffic happens?

[Joetunn]

Your page could have been the answer to a big television quiz question.

Check your analytics for the time and location of your traffic.

[doomsday0099]

the last time this happened to me was because of stumble upon. maybe it was picked up by some aggregator.

[WebLinkr]

> – Traffic source is organic (bots would be direct or referral from my understanding)

Actually, no, Bots are increasingly posing as organic traffic and its a real pain to remove. There is no way to filter historical traffic and in analytics you’ll have to use an advanced segment to remove them. GSC is a good acid test.

>
– 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

Um. So just remember how Analytics calculates time on page – its not nearly as sophisticated as the product team like to tell everyone – just try HotJar for a week – it calculates it by the difference in time between page 1 and 2, which means it can’t calculate the time on page 2. This is why Analytics can’t be trusted as a ranking source (I’m replying to a different post where people think time on-page is a ranking factor =) )

>
– 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.

Ahrefs doesn’t know visitor volumes – it borrows these from the Google Ad Planner which is an average, bucketed sum and is frequently out of date, especially for B2B, niches and keywords that people don’t frequently buy (why store data nobody needs when you’re already storing the data of the vast majority of companies on the planet via GSC, Analytics and Ads).

tl;dr People – stop trusting these tools like a bible!

[footinmymouth]

It’s very likely a bot, try a host domain filter in Google analytics

[no_technique]

Do you have Google search console set up for your site? That would be able to tell you what specific keywords were driving the organic traffic, and also tell you which pages were getting the clicks.

[diginaresh]

Few days back I also faced something similar to this. I got sudden hike in my traffic and I was wondering what happened that got me this traffic. Then after spending few hours on researching i find out that some of my keywords were ranking no 1 position in Bing search. I was not giving much importance to bing and didn’t check my ranking on bing search but after that day I think bing can also give you good results if you work on it and keep track of your rankings.

So this can be the case with you, look for traffic sources and you might find out something interesting.

Hope you guys find this helpful ✌

[lizfelifestyle]

same thing is happening to me!!

[c2u5hed]

It might be spam. In Google Analytics go to Acquisition -> All traffic -> Source/Medium, click on ‘google / organic’ and select ‘keyword’ as your secondary dimension. If it says anything akin to ‘bottraffic’ or points you to some website, then it’s spam traffic you were hit with. Shady companies do that so that you see the spike in your analytics, go ahead and find what the source is, see the website and go check it out. I think there already was a thread here that a lot of sites were hit with a similar attack a month ago or so.