• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Reporting & Analytics
        4. Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates

        Reporting & Analytics
        4
        4
        10982
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Whittie
          Whittie last edited by

          Hi all,

          Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags.

          Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug?

          Thanks in advance!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • TomRayner
            TomRayner last edited by

            Hey

            Could be web crawlers and othet bots.  You can jump in and take a look for yourself:

            In GA, click on the Audience Tab, then Technology, then Network.

            This will then list all of the ISPs that have visited your site.  I'm pretty confident that you will find the culprit in there.

            Now, if you're thinking - this is skewing my reporting, I don't want it in there - you can block that referrer in your GA report.  Here's how you do it:

            First - always make sure you keep an unfiltered version, just in case something goes wrong.

            In your filtered view, go to the Admin Tab, select the view you want to edit, and then click on filters.

            Click "add a new filter", then add a new filter like this:

            http://i.imgur.com/6WBhyJA.jpg

            Here, I am blocking Google's crawler. To block any other, all you'd need to do is to take the service provider name that you find in the technology -> network report and add it into that filter field (the brackets and ^ icon make it an exact match filter).  You can verify the filter before you apply it, and from therein that ISP will be removed from your report.  It won't retrospectively apply the filter, however.

            Hope this helps.

            Tom

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 6
            • GPainter
              GPainter last edited by

              You can go to

              Acquisition>referralsto find out where they might be coming from.I can imagine a lot of the visits are from GA code ghosting which is from sites like free-share-buttons.com etc. these can be filtered out of your reports etc. if it bugs you. Its a bit of a problem of late and bugs the heck out of me. Let me know if it is a lot of spammy looking referrals

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • Carloseo
                Carloseo last edited by

                Hi Whittie,

                The unusual spike on direct visits is most likely because of ghost spam, check your referrals and see if you see free-social-buttons or something similar (there might be others), this spammer has been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral. To be sure this is spam go to:

                Acquisition > Channels > All traffic > Select Hostname as a second dimension

                You will probably see a fake hostname or not set. Also, if you check the landing page they will be  "/" and the page title "Home Page" instead of the title of your real home page.

                The problem with conventional methods of stopping spam is that they will just take care of the referral part. The best solution for ghost spam is to use a filter that includes only your hostnames. This will stop ghost spam in any form referral, organic, page and even the fake direct visits.

                You can read this article for details about this specific issue and the valid hostname filter.

                http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/

                Hope it helps,

                Whittie

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • awilliams_kingston

                  Rogerbot directives in robots.txt

                  rogerbot reporting

                  I feel like I spend a lot of time setting false positives in my reports to ignore. Can I prevent Rogerbot from crawling pages I don't care about with robots.txt directives? For example., I have some page types with meta noindex and it reports these to me. Theoretically, I can block Rogerbot from these with a robots,txt directive and not have to deal with false positives.

                  Reporting & Analytics | | awilliams_kingston
                  0
                • Contentcoms

                  Organic traffic down

                  traffic

                  My 15 or so clients have all seen a drop in organic traffic by about 20% on GA4 for April. Rankings have not dropped or anything like that - so just wondering if anyone else has had similar?

                  Reporting & Analytics | | Contentcoms
                  2
                • inhouseninja

                  50% Drop in ALL Traffic Post June Update

                  traffic direct traffic analytics

                  We've had 50% drop in Google and Direct traffic post June Google update. Why would direct suddenly plummet as well? Could it be something with Google tag manager or our new cookie policy and cookie management system? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am a disabled person and trying to figure out what is going on with our site

                  Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja
                  0
                • graceflack 0

                  Abnormally High Direct Traffic Volume

                  google analytics reporting

                  We have abnormally high amounts of direct traffic to our site. It's comprising over half of all web traffic while organic is second with considerably less. From there the volume decreases amongst other channels. I've never seen such a huge proportion of traffic being attributed the Direct. Does anyone know how to test this or see if there is an error in Google Analytics reporting?

                  Reporting & Analytics | | graceflack 0
                  1
                • RosemaryB

                  We have a client that wants to apply UTM URL tagging to track local organic traffic in Google Analytics. Is there any benefit in doing this?

                  One of our clients requested that we apply UTM URL tagging to better track organic traffic in Google Analytics.   We found this to be an odd request because we are most familiar with UTM tracking for special campaigns (referral tracking, PPC, email tracking, etc). Is there any benefit of applying UTM tags to urls to analyze local organic traffic in Google Analytics?  Are there any resources out there about this? Thanks!

                  Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB
                  0
                • Solid_Gold

                  Title Tag Capitalization Impact on SERP Rankings and Click Through Rates

                  My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!

                  Reporting & Analytics | | Solid_Gold
                  0
                • s2bkevin

                  Does traffic coming from Adwords increase overall Domain Authority or Page Rank?

                  If I'm setting up an Adwords campaign, will setting my homepage as the landing page boost my domain rank? and will the Page Rank of the landing page get boosted because of the high click rate coming from the Adwords campaign?

                  Reporting & Analytics | | s2bkevin
                  0
                • Godad

                  Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?

                  Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!

                  Reporting & Analytics | | Godad
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.