The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Traffic has spiked — hallelujah! This is what you’ve been working towards!
Pause: before you start celebrating, it’s good to do your due diligence and make sure that glorious, spiked blue line under “All Users” is in fact genuine users visiting the site, and not spam.
The checklist to determine whether or not increased traffic is spam is not too difficult to follow. You’ll probably know in 10 minutes whether it’s time to do a celebratory dance, or if you need to solve a problem. Either way, today you’re going to do something valuable.
Before taking action on that pesky spam traffic, be sure to read this article in full. It’s important that spam traffic is identified from multiple indicators.
Identify spam traffic by checking suspiciously high (or low) metrics in Google Analytics
There are four core metrics that can point toward spam traffic:
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Average Session Duration
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Bounce Rate
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Pages/Session
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New Users
These Google Analytics metrics are incredibly useful for SEO and can be found in Google Analytics > Audience > Overview. Simple!
The more metrics throwing a suspiciously high or low result, the more likely it is that traffic is spam.
GA graph shows Audiences > Overview report. Metrics are looking healthy; no suspicious results. The four metrics used to determine if traffic is spam are highlighted with a blue rectangle.
#1 Average Session Duration
Average Session Duration in Google Analytics shares how long, on average, a user (visitor/person) has spent on a website during one session (a visit).
Generally, spam traffic doesn't spend long on a website. Spam traffic isn’t browsing the site — it’s not reading blogs or researching