Under Attack?

[bpitools]

Hi,

Last Wednesday is saw a sudden increase in webstraffic from google searches, bouncerate went down, New Visits up, traffic doubled... Lasted for about 24 hrs. Traffic mostly from USA.

However, user behavior was like a bot. Blazing through pages, at an average of 100 pages per user.....

When everything was back to normal, I thought, well. ok, no matter.

Actually blamed SEOMOZ Roger bot for it.... Because it were all keywords I had added recently, but Roger doesn't make ajax calls or trigger ga.js

But today, its happening again. Traffic increase, users blazing through pages upto 500 pages/user.....

Now also coming from Europe.

I disabled Google analytics for a while to see if "they" use the code elsewhere, but no. "They" actually are on the site itself. It also shows in webmaster tools, and wmt doesn't need javascript.

"They" actually use Google, and now also Yahoo to get to the site, and start blazing through the site.

Its robot like behavior, but the browsers seem to have normal user agents, have javascript (and cookies, I think) enabled and come from a very wide range of ip addresses...

Is this some sort of (black hat) attack or something? To get me kicked from Google and Yahoo?

I must be "someone" who wants to do harm, and gave some bot network a list of keywords? There is a misspelled keyword that is repeated over and over again.

Searches in French (and other languages) are performed in India, USA and repeated from various locations.... Now some of "them" with 500 pages per visit...

I have no defense. User Agents seem normal, ip's are widespread over the world... referers are Google and Yahoo.

What can I do?

???

[AlanMosley]

If it was a DOD attack its a weak effort, it may be screen scappers, spammers on the web do not always know what they are doing, take a look at some of the spam emails you get, addressed Dear "insert name here", they are not always the brightest crayons in the pack. It may be an error on their part.

[bpitools]

I suppose you mean Ddos...

I also saw, besides google and yahoo referers, the same behaviour from some other referers.

Anyways, it stopped again, sad to see my bounce rate go up again

Whoever initiated this, they have access to some bot network...

[AlanMosley]

UYes i think you are correct, but what ios their aim, testing? Making a balls up of it?

Who knows, but as long as they are not overloading your server I would not be too concerned

[bpitools]

it may be trying to "upset" google with automated requests, f@cking up analytics, or something. Allthough "bots", they also show up in webmaster tools, so google sees them as genuine users. And what would google do if they notice this behaviour? Afaik the number of visitors from a region and their behavior is one of the factors in ranking. It may be seen by google as an attempt to influence rankings.....