Fake Direct Traffic – Yahoo’s New Crawler?
Time to Read: 1m 34s
Have you seen a strange boost in direct traffic since December 19, 2012? Has it been steadily growing over the last few months? You might think that it’s your marketing efforts paying off; maybe your branding has finally found fertile ground! Unfortunately that’s not the case.
I first discovered the fake traffic several of weeks ago when trying to parse out some of the blocked Safari traffic (more on that in a later post). While trying to figure out more accurate traffic information for Safari, I noticed that for some sites Firefox was reporting unusually high direct traffic.
My curiosity was piqued I looked into the traffic and saw my average time on site decreasing, and my bounce rate increasing. I started digging into the data and found that all the traffic was coming from Firefox 3.5. The traffic from this browser appeared overnight on December 19th, 2012 and has a visit duration of 0 seconds along with a bounce rate nearing 100%. I took a look at some other sites and saw the same traffic pattern emerging on almost every single site.
Working off this premise I checked the network domain that the traffic was coming from, and all of it was coming from Yahoo.com. So it appears that since December Yahoo has been using a new bot that reports all its crawling as a direct visit. I don’t know why this crawler is being reported as traffic, but it has altered my data quite a bit over the last few months. Thankfully it is easy to take care of using advanced segments.
I first discovered the fake traffic several of weeks ago when trying to parse out some of the blocked Safari traffic (more on that in a later post). While trying to figure out more accurate traffic information for Safari, I noticed that for some sites Firefox was reporting unusually high direct traffic.
My curiosity was piqued I looked into the traffic and saw my average time on site decreasing, and my bounce rate increasing. I started digging into the data and found that all the traffic was coming from Firefox 3.5. The traffic from this browser appeared overnight on December 19th, 2012 and has a visit duration of 0 seconds along with a bounce rate nearing 100%. I took a look at some other sites and saw the same traffic pattern emerging on almost every single site.
Working off this premise I checked the network domain that the traffic was coming from, and all of it was coming from Yahoo.com. So it appears that since December Yahoo has been using a new bot that reports all its crawling as a direct visit. I don’t know why this crawler is being reported as traffic, but it has altered my data quite a bit over the last few months. Thankfully it is easy to take care of using advanced segments.