Large amount of access from bot traffic

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bot traffic

I’m writing this article because there was a large amount of bot traffic on this site between midnight of February 1, 2021 and early morning of February 2, 2021.

One morning, I noticed a large number of sessions on Google Analytics Integration for WordPress (GAinWP), which is displayed on the dashboard of the WordPress admin panel.

For a moment, I thought that some article might have buzzed, but even so, the number of PVs was outstanding and the figures were abnormal.

I checked the page with Google Analytics, and found that the page /bot-traffic.icu was getting a lot of access.

Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages.

However, the article with this URL does not exist in this blog.

When I actually try to access it, I get a 404 page not found.

access source

I used Google Analytics to check the access source by region, and it seems that there is more than one place.

Not set is the most common.

• Hangzhou: China
• Beijing: China
• Dhaka: Bangladesh
• Lagos: Nigeria
• Shanghai: China
• Jakarta: Indonesia
• Chengdu: China
• Zhuhai: China

There are a wide variety of them, mainly in China.

The OS and browsers were all different, so it is likely that there was actually a large amount of access from terminals in multiple locations.

Other Information

I searched for some information on bot-traffic.icu and found a few foreign blogs.

It seems that there are several sites that have suffered from the same problem in the past few days.

Some of the sites set up filters in Google Analytics because they didn’t want to see abnormal aggregate results, but I didn’t set up filters because it’s not a fundamental solution and I didn’t want to lose track of it when accesses occur again in the future.

Also, according to the information on foreign blogs, the page to be accessed changes from time to time, so I felt it was a weasel word.

Objective

I’m not sure what the purpose of this bot is.

From the logs, it didn’t try to hack, it just repeatedly accessed the same (non-existent) page.

When I accessed /bot-traffic.icu, I was redirected to the following site (I won’t link to it)

It seems to be a site where people pay to buy traffic.

It seems to be a demonstration that “we can increase your traffic with bot traffic”.

There’s no way I’m going to take advantage of this.

It may increase PV, but it doesn’t mean that people are actually reading the page, so it’s not good for SEO.

If I find a fundamental solution, I’ll write about it separately.

In addition to the above page, there was a large amount of access to bottraffic999.xyz yesterday.

The destination is the same page as last time, and it seems that they are changing the destination address periodically to avoid filtering.

I set up a .htaccess file to prohibit access to bot traffic that accesses my site with slightly different referrers.

For more details, please refer to this article.

I hope this article will be useful to someone somewhere.