Please Help Out: Sudden Traffic Spike - Is it an Attack?

Dark Hat 007 · Dec 17, 2020

I just checked my GA and the is a sudden traffic spike that brought it 104 visits. My average number of visits per hour is 16.

Now, this traffic was direct no referral, or Organic. The visits were to different pages of my site, each had 1 visit.

I have temporarily removed my Adsense account.

Please, what is happening here!!!!

Dark Hat 007 · Dec 17, 2020

I carried out a little Audit and I discovered the traffic was from Boardman. This is one of Amazon's data centers.

So, I believe the traffic is from an Amazon bot who is scanning my site to get some new ideas to steal more traffic from SEs.

These articles confirm this

https://blogspiritgeek.wordpress.com/2018/07/08/boardman-bots-google-analytics/
https://www.glowmetrics.com/blog/analytics-bot-spam-amazon/#gref
This might help someone, I'm still observing it though.

blackbeans · Dec 17, 2020

Anyone have any background on that bot? Is it scraping info?

pepekobasa · Dec 19, 2020

Dark Hat 007 said:
I carried out a little Audit and I discovered the traffic was from Boardman. This is one of Amazon's data centers.

So, I believe the traffic is from an Amazon bot who is scanning my site to get some new ideas to steal more traffic from SEs.

These articles confirm this

https://blogspiritgeek.wordpress.com/2018/07/08/boardman-bots-google-analytics/
https://www.glowmetrics.com/blog/analytics-bot-spam-amazon/#gref
This might help someone, I'm still observing it though.

That is why I don't use Amazon lol

rajkumar31 · Dec 19, 2020

That's seriously bad for your Adsense. Good that you were able to act quickly and then researched the reason behind it. Thanks for sharing.

HeleneOnWheels · Jan 23, 2021

Hi, I'm bumping your post because I found it in search. This happened to me last night. I suddenly had 40-50 users from Boardman. I thought it was a DDOS attack, I had no idea as I've never encountered something like this before.

Did you ever find a solution? I don't want them destroying my bounce rate. And I'm worried about whether they may have clicked PPC ads on my page (they're not Adsense, I manage them myself).

Dark Hat 007 · Feb 1, 2021

HeleneOnWheels said:
Hi, I'm bumping your post because I found it in search. This happened to me last night. I suddenly had 40-50 users from Boardman. I thought it was a DDOS attack, I had no idea as I've never encountered something like this before.

Did you ever find a solution? I don't want them destroying my bounce rate. And I'm worried about whether they may have clicked PPC ads on my page (they're not Adsense, I manage them myself).

Do you have Amazon affiliate links on your site?

Please Help Out: Sudden Traffic Spike - Is it an Attack?

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