Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed

[KJ_AV]

For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site.

We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case.

It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off.

Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site.

(FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.

[EGOL]

One morning, a few months ago we saw lots of mobile phone traffic building.   All was hitting our homepage which is very resource intensive.  All of this traffic generated one page view.  All of the traffic was coming from a few countries in Asia and Africa.  No referrer.  Looked like a DDOS attack.

We go to Cloudflare, got a $20/month account, switched DNS to CF, forced untrusted visits from those countries to verify before allowing entry.  Squeezed this traffic down to almost nothing within a few hours.  Left CF run for a few weeks.  Rouge traffic disappeared.

Now we have CF ready to go with all settings in place.  Can turn it on in two minutes and have the shield in place as DNS propagates.

[KJ_AV]

This looks very similar to what we are seeing. We took CloudFlare as well - but stayed with Free account with "Site Under Attack" mode, which should force the visits to verify.

Will it be possible for you to share the settings on CloudFlare? Did you use their Firewall as well? Also, did you see any SEO impact, by any chance?

[EGOL]

If you don't use Firewall, Cloudflare in your situation will have almost no effect.

We used our analytics to determine the countries where the traffic was coming from.  Then went into CF FW.

Click the blue Help link for each tool to decide upon the settings that you want to try.

Here is what we used....

Security Level... Medium

Challenge Passage... one day

Access rules....  country name, challenge, this website

Impact of the above....  Many bots already recognized by CF will be blocked.  Access rules will present each visitor from those countries a form similar to a captcha.  They must pass the captcha to get in.

After you turn this on, watch your short term stats.  You should see an increase in blocking.

We ran the above for a few weeks without any obvious SEO impact.  Then switched our DNS back to normal, moving away from CF.... but kept the $20/month account and our settings in place.   CF was time-consuming to set up.

[KJ_AV]

Thanks for your help - this works to a large degree.

Have hit a new challenge though, our AWS servers are in one of these countries which are sending traffic. And we have multiple servers talking to each other enabling Login / other actions on the site.

While I have blocked all the other countries, blocking country with AWS servers is creating problem with Login. Trying to figure this out!

[EGOL]

By resetting your DNS to CF, your server is no longer used.  All traffic is routed to one of CF's data centers and there are over 100 of them distributed throughout the world.

Also, in the CF settings, you want to "challenge" the visitors from problem countries.  This will give them a captcha to complete.  When they complete that captcha one time, you can then give them long term access without the challenge.  CF will progressively become better at filtering the bots and allowing more trusted visitors in without a challenge.

[Mobilio]

Just as EGOL describe it.

If you're on Amazon AWS then you can use their CloudFront as CDN. But also you can observe source of traffic. Could coming from one country, one IP range or one user-agent. There should be some kind of pattern and you should investigate it.

Then just need to make rule to block that traffic or just redirect them to one static "hello world" page.

I was also victim of such traffic, but was from humans trying to depleting an AdWords daily budget. Once budget it over ads was stopped showing, after few hours they recalculate clicks, some funds was returned, ads are shown again, they click it, budget is over... and so on.