Organic Traffic Dead After Bot Attack

samthevick

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Hello Dear BHW Members.

Seeking here for help since I had troubles recently in my most high website.

We were having around 200-1000 visits daily with over 30k impressions per day on forex niche.

Somehow, this saturday, we had 50k visits on the website, without change on impressions, since then, it's now tuesday, and we are at zero clicks on Google.

All the IPs are different, and they were 0 seconds on the website.

If it ever happened to you or you have any recommendation I would be grateful.

Thank you!
 
It might be a bot attack that affected your SEO metrics . please check your server log for unusual activity and improve site security to prevent such bot attacks
 

SEO Recommendations:​

1. Check for Bot Traffic:

  • The sudden spike in visits with 0-second durations suggests that your site may have been targeted by bots.
  • Use tools like Google Analytics or server logs to identify and block these suspicious IPs.

2. Investigate for Crawling Issues:

  • Ensure your site's crawling and indexing settings in Google Search Console are correct.
  • Look for any manual actions or security issues reported.

3. Review Recent Changes:

  • Reflect on any recent changes made to the website, including content updates, new plugins, or security settings, which might have impacted your site’s performance.

4. Monitor Server Performance:

  • Ensure your server isn’t experiencing overloads or downtimes that could affect site accessibility.
  • Check server logs for unusual activity during the spike period.

5. Enhance Security Measures:

  • Implement security plugins or services to protect against bot attacks.
  • Use CAPTCHA to verify human visitors and reduce bot traffic.

6. Analyze Traffic Sources:

  • Determine where the spike in traffic originated. Identify if it’s from referral sites, direct, or other suspicious sources.
  • Adjust your referral exclusions in Google Analytics if necessary.

7. Revalidate Site Ownership in Search Console:

  • Sometimes, revalidating site ownership in Google Search Console can help reset and re-sync data discrepancies.

8. Seek Professional Assistance:

  • If the problem persists, consider consulting with an SEO expert or a digital marketing agency specializing in forensic analysis to diagnose and rectify the issue.
By taking these steps, you can better understand the cause of the traffic anomaly and work towards restoring your website's performance.

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Confirm whether the website suffers from black hat SEO attacks: by checking the website's keyword rankings and traffic changes, as well as sudden drops in rankings to confirm whether it suffers from black hat SEO attacks.

Clean up abnormal links: Black hat SEO attacks often include a large number of spam links pointing to the attacked website, which need to be cleaned up in time. Tools such as Google Search Console can be used to identify and remove these links.

Repair website content: If a black hat SEO attack results in the content of the website being tampered with or a large amount of spam content being added, it needs to be cleaned up in a timely manner to restore the normal content and to ensure that the content of the website complies with search engine specifications.

Submit a re-examination application: After cleaning up abnormal links and restoring normal content, you can submit a re-examination application through tools such as Google Search Console to request the search engine to re-examine the website.

Strengthen website security: Strengthen the security of your website, including updating your website's plug-ins, themes and CMS systems, and using secure passwords to protect your website from further black hat SEO attacks.

Optimize website content and links: Optimize your website's content and links to improve your website's ranking in search engines and increase beneficial traffic through legitimate SEO methods.

A case in point is a corporate website that suffered a black hat SEO attack, with a sudden drop in rankings and a sharp decrease in traffic. After cleaning up the abnormal links, fixing the website content and submitting a re-review application, the website gradually regained its normal ranking and traffic.
 
Confirm whether the website suffers from black hat SEO attacks: by checking the website's keyword rankings and traffic changes, as well as sudden drops in rankings to confirm whether it suffers from black hat SEO attacks.

Clean up abnormal links: Black hat SEO attacks often include a large number of spam links pointing to the attacked website, which need to be cleaned up in time. Tools such as Google Search Console can be used to identify and remove these links.

Repair website content: If a black hat SEO attack results in the content of the website being tampered with or a large amount of spam content being added, it needs to be cleaned up in a timely manner to restore the normal content and to ensure that the content of the website complies with search engine specifications.

Submit a re-examination application: After cleaning up abnormal links and restoring normal content, you can submit a re-examination application through tools such as Google Search Console to request the search engine to re-examine the website.

Strengthen website security: Strengthen the security of your website, including updating your website's plug-ins, themes and CMS systems, and using secure passwords to protect your website from further black hat SEO attacks.

Optimize website content and links: Optimize your website's content and links to improve your website's ranking in search engines and increase beneficial traffic through legitimate SEO methods.

A case in point is a corporate website that suffered a black hat SEO attack, with a sudden drop in rankings and a sharp decrease in traffic. After cleaning up the abnormal links, fixing the website content and submitting a re-review application, the website gradually regained its normal ranking and traffic.
Thank you for asking for GPT queen :)
 
In our experience, in most cases negative SEO doesn't really affect rankings, but in most cases it can still affect you in other ways, so we've given a warning here because we've definitely seen it work. While in most cases these spammy links are ignored by search engines, that's not all, it has other bad effects.


You will see that if you get 100,000 links pointing to a site, what actually happens in the backend of the SEO tool is that data analysis gone wrong has a huge impact on SEO decisions.

Taking you beyond the data limits in SEO tools

For example, if you get 100,000 links to your site, it puts you over the limit of the number of links that SEO tools will give you in the various reports on links.

Good links

What this means is that in the second case, you may not be able to find really valuable links in the SEO reports.

Well, this is important because if you have to make a decision about how to improve your rankings and you don't have access to the link data you need because it has been overshadowed by thousands of spammy links, then you can't make the right decision.

Increased cost of viewing all the data

The problem here is the increased cost of data analysis. You will have to spend more on labor and cost of SEO tools because of more than 100,000 links.

A big problem behind all of this is that even though we know that search engines ignore most of these links, they don't label them for us in any useful way. Even if we could analyze all the link data, thousands of spammy links would make it impossible to determine what is important and what is not.
 
jesus fucking christ how many chatgpt "experts"
I'm not really sure what is happening on this thread, but I believe you're probably the 2nd real person here :D
 
you may want to consider implementing measures to monitor and filter out any suspicious traffic to protect your website
I have Cloudflare on the website. It did not said nothing, and it tells only 100 sessions are from bots. I can't really understand
 
Check Google Analytics for unusual traffic. It could be a bot influx or a Google algorithm hiccup affecting visibility.
 
That's a crazy drop. I've never experienced it personally, so I don't know for sure what the correct response is. If it were me I'd probably just try and wait it out, especially if the site's not changed in quality or accessibility because of the attack. Are you thinking Google's suspecting you of sending the traffic to yourself? Could G's crawlers have had trouble accessing the site during the traffic swarm and they're giving your server a cool-down period as a way to help you get it back on track, and as a way to not send people to a crashed website? Dunno...
 
I to suggest Check Google Analytics for unusual traffic; it could indicate a bot influx.
 
This is a new bh seo tactic which appeared recently, its like a nuclear bomb of neg seo, this is sad. Counter measures are necessary.
 
go check your Google Search Console account and check for any messages or notifications. check the quality of the traffic you received during the surge cause you said that the sessions were very short (0 seconds) this could indicate that the traffic was not genuine ( bot traffic) or verify if there are any technical issues on your website that could have caused the sudden drop in Google clicks
 
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