: What to do against It all started early this year. Day-to-Day my Google Analytics of a swiss-website (german language) showed me more and more visitors — mainly from the US and France. First,

Posted in: #GoogleAnalytics #GoogleAnalyticsSpam #Spam

It all started early this year. Day-to-Day my Google Analytics of a swiss-website (german language) showed me more and more visitors — mainly from the US and France. First, of-course, I was really happy because of the good numbers … but than, after a few weeks of 20%+ new visitors each, I got a suspicious about that sudden rush of new visitors. I digged deeper and looked what exactly do they visit on our page and how long they are on our page … first, they only remain about < 1 Second on our page. And there seams not to be a special site, which they preferred. It looks like they visit random pages, new ones, old ones, popular ones, not so popular ones … and I found out that they are mainly from these Countries: United States, China, France and Thailand.

I tried to filter out those bad «<1s Visitors» from my Analytics-Numbers. This worked quite well, except that I had to re-check the filter just one or two weeks ago, since there was a 10-20%+ new visitor rush again … now there were many new <1s-visitors from Yemen, Belgium and Nigeria too. So the country-list expanded to: United States, China, France, Thailand, Yemen, Belgium and Nigeria

Was it in the beginning of the year «only» about 20% of all logged visits, now there are already 540% more <1s than regular visitors today! … thats massive!
They are in the thousands … and they slow down our page massively 'cause of all those additional requests.

Is this a known problem? What can I do against these <1s-Visitors? -> Not only filter them out of my Analytics-Numbers, but to do something against them since they slow down the page massively too.

Some additional Infos (from the stats of the last 7 Days):

As Refferer almost all of these <1s-visitors have «(direct) / (none)»
And as Hostnames they have: «(not set)» (28,23 %; US), «ovh ltd» (25,59 %; BE), «ovh static ip» (17,06 %; FR), «vps cheap inc.» (14,44 %; YE), «ovh hosting inc.» (12.23%; US)
99,9 % Firefox
99,9 % Macintosh (v10.10)
99.8 % en-us