staffjam - 2:44 am on Feb 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

Seeing as a few people are having trouble with the link i thought i'd post the message from Google Groups - hope this is okay:

Hi

This isn't actually a question, but actually a warning. I looked for an answer to my problem here a couple of days ago, couldn't find an answer, did a lot of had scratching and eventually found the answer which I'd like to share with you.

On Wednesday at about 4pm I noticed on Analytics a surge in direct traffic for some reason. I wasn't unduly worried. I then checked on my iPhone App later in the evening, and noticed overall our site bounce rate had gone up to 70%. I just thought I was being attacked by a couple of static IP's from somewhere (why do they do that I wonder). Annoying as our bounce rate is around 30% normally. We're a niche site and only get around 300 visits per day, so a few bounces can make a difference.

Anyway, Thursday morning I came in and checked Analytics proper, and we'd had 900 visits between midnight and 9am, with 99.8% bounce rate. We had slipped down the rankings by quite a few notches as well which was annoying. So we checked out the domains, and there were all pretty usual ISP's, so we checked the IP addresses, and they were pretty much all dynamic. But something very odd was happening and we were getting quite concerned, as when every hour passed we were getting hundreds of bounces an hour.

Then, I received this e-mail:

"Hi Tim,
Having spoken with Chris yesterday, I believe you are the best person to speak with about your website.
I performed a quick test on your home page last night which is attached below. As you can see the availability was around 95%, equating to 5% of customers being unable to access the site.
End-to-End Chart: Average
Test name:
True Traveller – FF Agent
Time Period:
Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:00 to Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:00
(GMT) Greenwich Mean Time : Dublin, London

graph attached etc

I work for Compuware Gomez who are the Market Leaders in Monitoring Web Applications and work with over 3000+ companies around the world, including 12 of the top 20 most visited websites, to optimise customer experience and increase conversion rates.

Here is a brief overview of what the Gomez platform has to offer:
• Monitor the real-time performance of your website from the customer perspective
• Be notified instantly of any outages or slowdowns that impact your customers and revenue
• Have detailed diagnostics information at hand to minimize troubleshooting and fire fighting
• Test to ensure your applications can handle expected traffic load/capacity
• Validate visual functionality across multiple browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions
Feel free to get in touch for further information or a demo of our services tailored to you.


Kind Regards,
Lois Aldington
Business Development
Compuware Limited"

So I looked up Gomez, and saw that these "homeworkers" allow a program to be installed on their home PC, and Gomez call it up to "check" sites. These homeworkers are paid $5 per month or something. They have 150,000 distributed nodes!

So I had an e-mail battle with Compuware, and they said "These hits on your website are nothing to with us... we'll stop monitoring it" etc. Suddenly, all these hits to our homepage stopped. Our IT people said this was probably a breach of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

So the moral of this is if you suddenly have a massive surge of direct traffic to your homepage all with 100% bounce rates from a variety of ISP's from all over the world, check with your guys to ensure no one from Compuware has phoned up trying to sell you something!