Thousands of visits from Hyderabad (India) and from Dublin (Ireland)

[FelixHe]

Since yesterday, I am receiving thousands of visits from India and Ireland. Both of those are not our target audience. When looking at those visitors, they are mostly users on Chrome OS, with Chrome.

Google Analytics shows me this traffic as organic traffic with the respective URL as keyword.

My first thought was that it might be connected to me having set up an automatic ad campaign on AdWords three days ago, but I am having doubts, since google probably won't be testing all the links manually. My concern now is that our content is being scraped. Also, I am wondering why the traffic is shown as organic search.

[becole]

Felix, there is a good chance that this is referral spam. The goal of a referral spammer is to get you to notice those URLs, and investigate them as if they are sending traffic to your website. Typically, those visitors won't stay long on your website, and they won't have your domain name as the "hostname" in Google Analytics.

Take a look at the traffic and see if it does have a hostname associated with it, and if it's actual human visitors. I bet it's not.

[FelixHe]

Hi Bernadette,

Thank you for your response! It was not ghostspam, the hostname is always our website (I saw the traffic on our "clean-view", where I only allow our website's hostnames.

The longer I think about it, the more I have the feeling that there are some guys at Google Dublin and Google Hyderabad who manually looked at all our new AdWords links...

[FelixHe]

I have heard from Google in the meanwhile who neither confirmed, nor denied that the sessions came from their AdWords team in India and Dublin, but told me several times to activate the Bot-blocking feature in Google Analytics. I still believe that this is strange behaviour for a bot, but I will activate this feature and will see if the issue comes up in the future again.