: Why do I get so many visitors from Germany? This has bothered me for a long time as it puts my sites bounce rate up. I am based in the UK and my business covers this country and no others,

@Megan663

How is your German traffic accessing your site? Have you looked at your site's link profile? A tool like Moz's Open Site Explorer, Majectic SEO, or Ahrefs can help you determine whose linking to your site and the geographic location of the site hosting the links. Although I'd start with Analytics referral traffic.

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@Alves908

I study this kind of traffic as part of my research.

Simply put, these are bot visits. You know this because of the hit and run nature of most bots that are not scrapers. This is evident in the number of pages and the bounce rate. Bots, including scrapers, often result in a %100 bounce rate. But without further data, I cannot tell you much about your specific scenario.

I am not a big fan of Google Analytics for one simple reason. It does not give the entire view of traffic to your site and can be overly complicated. It is excellent to mine data that only Google can provide so I always recommend it.

But only after a log file analysis tool or other traffic analysis tool has been installed.
piwik.org/ (one of the best I have seen - free) www.awstats.org/ (fairly basic but popular - free) www.webalizer.org/ (fairly basic but popular - free)

These will give you the information you need including GEOIP data (what country they come from).

What you want to do is to find all the domain names and IP addresses that abuse your site regardless of where they come from. You will want to block them. You will need to research each and every access and determine if these accesses are wanted or not. Some, while increasing your bounce rate, may actually be good for you. So do your research and make up your own mind on what accesses are useful.

I am assuming Apache here:

You can block them using .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} example.com
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]


-or-

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} 10.101.102.103 [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]


Obviously, replace the domain name/IP address with the offending domain or IP.

What you have to keep in mind is that it does take a while to figure out who the good guys are and who the bad guy are. It will become clear to you based upon your traffic over time. If you ever have any questions, post them here with enough data and we will try and tell you who they are and whether you may want to block them.

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@Correia994

Blocking a whole country like Germany is not recommended since its generally high quality traffic. Ukraine and China however are extreme spammers and you can get away with country block due to their low quality everything.

You should first start to log user agents and IP's from Germany to deduce what type of user they are. If you find its scattered and cannot deduce from user agents, start checking the IP's to see if they are real peoples ISP or if they are server requests. If you find that they are server requests, check them against blacklists. Ban away. If they are not in blacklists, or they are real ISP's, check your backlinks/referrer profiles in a server side tool like AWstats in cPanel.

If you see that there are many non-related sites forwarding traffic to you, and you cant find your links on those sites, its some kinda strange net. We are experiencing the same thing from Russia (many users). Our referrer profile shows hundreds of .ru sites pushing users, but nowhere on those sites is our link.

Although not necessarily recommended for most sites or new webmasters, you can block referred traffic from these bad domains using HTACCESS with a tool such as www.htaccesstools.com/block-hitbots/ and then add those same domains to the Google disavow tool too. This will prevent the people from coming via those routes, and tell Google "Hey listen I don't want these sites linking or forwarding traffic to me, ignore them". Only use this if you're confident you know what you're doing :)

This should reduce bounce in general and clean up evil routes if that be the case. As a bonus it will tell Google to ignore the trash too.

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