Spikes in traffic to soatechnology.net from China and Singapore likely indicate bot activity, rather than a genuine surge in interest. This type of traffic is common and can be caused by malicious bots or non-malicious crawlers. To determine the specific cause for your site, you should analyze your traffic metrics.
Indicators of bot traffic
If the traffic surge is from bots, your website analytics may show the following signs:
- High bounce rate: Visitors arrive on a page and leave almost immediately, indicating they are not genuinely engaging with the content.
- Unusual session duration: Sessions may be extremely short (less than a few seconds) or suspiciously long. Human traffic is more varied.
- Unusual geographic location: If your business does not target customers in China or Singapore, a sudden spike from these locations is a red flag.
- Irregular user behavior: Bot traffic can be identified by its lack of typical human interaction, such as no mouse movements, no clicks on navigation, or filling out forms with gibberish.
- High new sessions: A disproportionately high percentage of new sessions, paired with other indicators, can signal bot activity.
- Identical user agents: If a large number of visitors are using the same user agent string (which identifies the browser), it suggests a single bot or bot network.
Potential causes of fake traffic
Traffic from China and Singapore is often associated with the following bot activities:
- Web scraping: These bots systematically scan and extract content and data from websites. They may be used for market research, but also by competitors to steal data.
- Click fraud: This type of fraud involves bots generating fake ad clicks to waste an advertiser’s budget. This results in inflated traffic numbers that don’t convert into actual leads or sales.
- Ad viewability fraud: Bots are used to create fake impressions on webpages, which manipulates the site’s value for advertisers.
- Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks: In a DoS attack, an attacker uses bots to flood a site with traffic to overwhelm the server and make the site unavailable to real users.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation: Sometimes, malicious actors send bot traffic to competitors’ websites to artificially inflate their bounce rates and potentially damage their search engine rankings.
How to investigate and resolve the issue
To get an accurate understanding of the traffic, you should take the following steps:
- Analyze your analytics: Go into your website’s analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) and filter your traffic data by country, behavior, and session duration. This will allow you to see if the traffic from China and Singapore displays the characteristics of bot activity.
- Filter known bots: Most analytics platforms have a setting to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders. Enabling this feature can help clean up your data.
- Use a firewall or bot mitigation service: For more robust protection, services like Cloudflare can help filter out malicious bot traffic before it even reaches your server.
- Block suspicious IP addresses: If you identify specific IP ranges or networks associated with the bot activity, you can block them in your firewall settings.
