Weird Traffic Spike Coming From Googlebot

[justinn49589501]

Hey guys,

I've run into a weird issue recently where our website started receiving a 10x spike in traffic according to Omniture. However, when we dug into it, the traffic wasn't tied to any page or URL on our site, and had no meta data (browser, etc). We also use GA for high-level metrics, which saw no corresponding spike in traffic (and we saw no spike in our server logs, either). The only thing we knew is that it came from Mountain View, CA (which obviously makes it seem like it was coming from Google) and that most of it comes from the googlebot.com domain. We've begun excluding the IPs so that they stop corrupting our data, but we're still unclear on what's caused this. Has anyone seen anything like this? If anyone could shed some insight, it would be appreciated.

- Justin

[brian_au]

Hi,

Have you also enabled via the Admin Console auto bot rules on the report suite? This will automatically filter out the traffic based on the maintained IAB bot list:

https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/bot_rules.html

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/whats-new-in-adobe-sitecatalyst-15-3/

Best,

Brian

[justinn49589501]

Hey Brian,

Yeah, I did that after the spike happened, so it's not a problem going forward, but was just looking for some explanation as to why it happened in the first place.

[brian_au · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As you note its simply Google's crawler- so whenever their crawler reaches your site if you don't filter out bots it will impact Adobe Analytics traffic records.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072?hl=en

Best,

Brian