

Ask HN: Google spike of direct traffic - soho33

over the past 2 weeks we've seen a very high spike in direct traffic to our site.<p>i've attached pictures below:<p>http://i40.tinypic.com/1zv3jn4.jpg<p>http://i39.tinypic.com/15qogop.jpg<p>we basically jumped from 5000 a day to 15000 a day with most of the increase being targetted towards only 2 of our pages with high bounce rates and small "avg time on site".<p>any one else experience this? i look at the logs and the traffic is not from one IP. the top 30 big hitters are all different IP and subnets.<p>any google experts willing to shed some light on this?<p>Thanks!
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kristianp
Direct traffic has nothing to do with google and if it's only two pages, it's
probably not a search engine.

You should be able to check analytics for the user-agent, legitimate search
robots have an identifiable user agent string. Can you give more information
about the nature of those two pages?

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cheae
Is it organic traffic from Google? or Direct traffic? You mentioned both in
your question.

If it is organic traffic from Google, we too noticed a change in Google
traffic around that date to our various sites. It may be a recent change in
Google algorithm worked in favour of your pages.

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soho33
it's direct traffic. they are mainly hitting 2 pages on our site.

the organic traffic from google has been consistent going up and down slightly
which is normal.

however the direct traffic shot up from 1100 to 14000 a day!

i'm not too worried now since it's not eating too much bandwidth but it could
cause an issue soon by bogging down all the bandwidth.

in my robots.txt i have: User-Agent: * Disallow: /rate.php Disallow:
/ratewp.php Disallow: /brokenLink.php Disallow: /download.php

should i restrict the user-agent to only bing, google and yahoo to see if that
might be it?

the fact that it's all US based IPs is what's weird.

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trienthusiast
can it be an image search ?

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soho33
i don't think so cause it's only hitting 2 pages consistently.

