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Smith883

: A bounce-rate attack to manipulate SEO? This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue. We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google

@Smith883

Posted in: #BounceRate #Hacking #Security #Seo

This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue.

We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google Analytics.
Some dude from Finland, namely, from Kouvola city is hitting one of our pages - only one page on our site, 'bout a hundred times per day, all with an average bounce rate of 90%+...

This is causing our overall bounce rate to go up by 1 to 3% per day... which is very disturbing.. since we're trying to do our best in order to keep it as low as possible.
And obviously having it jumped from ~24% to 27%, just because of that crazy dude is not making us happy at all... We tried implementing a geo-targeted script in order to catch this particular visitor and deliver him a juicy message, and it seemed like it helped in the beginning, it has stopped for a day or two, but now he's back...

The geo-targeted script was also logging all IP addresses for page requests originating from Finland in order to find out more details and (in order to block them on the server level, later).. but thing is, it was all mainly cable or DSL connections with various, but not constantly repeating IPs... we are all wondering what is he up to really ?

I think that this page should be kept updated with ideas on how to combat this and perhaps someone could also shed light on what it might be ? What is the reason for doing this "bounce-rate attack", as I call it?

There was a similar question asked on stackoverflow earlier, with no meaningful answer - here - stackoverflow.com/questions/5074035/how-to-stop-bounce-rate-manipulation

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@Kristi941

This kind of attack won't affect your rankings as bounce rate is almost certainly not a ranking factor.

It's hard to say why this user is doing this but I doubt it's to manipulate your bounce rate or site stats. More likely reasons are:


they are trying to attack your site through that page.
that page being loaded somehow benefits them and thus they are automating the process (it's hard to say if this is the case without knowing more about that particular page).
that page is stuck in their browser cache and every time they load their browser it pulls up that. That may be due to a faulty browser extension that loads previously closed tabs or something along those lines.
that page is the default homepage in their browser and every time they open up their browser is loads that page.

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