Facing strange organic traffic from Google

[alexod]

Guys need your advice,

One of my client's websites 2 months had 40-70 organic users per day (GA stats). It's a law office website located in CA. 1 month ago I noticed that traffic started to increase and step by step it went to 350-400/per day. Most of the traffic that days was coming to 2-3 blog posts related to "senate Law regulations". Traffic changes I noticed in Google Analytics and in Awstats, webalizer installed on the server, but most of all in was in GA.

I forgot to tell that we had 20-40 users from Google Ads, 20-40 users from Social media (we don't run any adv right now)

Week ago I noticed that few days traffic increased to 450-550, but everything started at Friday. That day traffic increased to 2500, on Saturday is was 5500, 7500 on Sunday and the nightmare started at Monday (08.31.2020) - according to Google Analytics it was 54,728 organic users. There was also Direct traffic and Social traffic (4800 / 3700). https://prnt.sc/u9qe3iDuring the whole day we had 250-300 (at morning hours) and 500/600 real time users on website (afternoon).

These are the numbers right now - 9:12am PST 09.01.20 https://prnt.sc/u9qfx3

Again -99.5 % traffic to one blog post, and the rest to other pages - https://prnt.sc/u9qh0e

This was permanent during the whole day - https://prnt.sc/u9qh0e

CPU usage on server increased and time by time it was 99-100%, but the same time I don't see any huge activity on website . I mean the conversions (calls and web form submissions) are the same or even slower than usually. Ask hoster to check from his side, but his answer was that this is organic traffic - and there isn't any bot activity.

To be honest I"m not sure what is that, and a little bit scared if that will be increase during the day or week. IN another situation I'll be happy to have such traffic increase, but this is something wrong.

Please advice - what I need to do?

Looks like on hosting right now everything is OK. CPU usage and memory usage are fine, which is odd - we have 382 real time users according to GA.

I'm confused, and don't understand what is this. Mostly thinking about Google glitch, coz don't thinking that 55k users/day looking for that Senate law regulation - Forgot to mention that with that keyword/keyphrase we are on 1-2nd positions on google (even have Zero position - snippet), but I'm not sure that this these days this was in top News.

[NickMNS]

Wow it sucks to be you [sarcasm]. Most of us can only dream of such an increase in traffic, and your complaining pffft!. Just kidding!

A few ideas.
1- Bug -- Real-Time Google Analytics has been having on and off again glitches. The glitch has been that users are added continuously as they come but then stale users are never removed from the count. So the real-time numbers grow. But the good news is that when it occurs it only impacts the real-time view and the other reports are unaffected. What does Audience Overview say. It seems unlikely that this is the case, but it can be quickly eliminated by checking the Audience Overview. Also, you say that the traffic appears in AWstats, so even less likely.
2- What do your raw logs show?
3- Where (geo) is the traffic coming from?
4- Have you checked to see if the blog posts in question have been linked by some prominent news source or even potentially reddit? Typically traffic from a reddit post would appear as referral or direct traffic. It appears from your screen caps that this is not referral traffic, so this may simply be a result of gaining the benefit from a or a few high value link. (Best case scenario).

Please advice - what I need to do?
Looks like on hosting right now everything is OK. CPU usage and memory usage are fine, which is odd - we have 382 real time users according to GA.

If you are concerned with the server load, sign-up to Cloudflare. Since your traffic is going to only a few pages, Cloudflare can cache resources and/or the page and serve them from the cache, relieving your server from much of the load. Here is some info:
[cloudflare.com...]

[alexod]

Hi Nick,

thanks for quick response

Here is the shot from Audience overview for yesterday - https://prnt.sc/u9rq7y
3- Where (geo) is the traffic coming from? - that is us traffic - [prnt.sc...]
4. No there are 4-5 internal links and 2 links to .gov websites
2. I'm going to check it now

>>>If you are concerned with the server load, sign-up to Cloudflare.

Yes, agree, but sometimes it takes time on Godaddy to switch DNS records (I had bad experience when it takes 24 hours on propagation). All that time in order to show previous A record ( previous hosting) - there was Godaddy default page view. Even if I'm complaining of that traffic now (:-) ) I understand that in this situation it's better to have, and very bad to return 404 error.

Must faster to switch A record on godaddy, but I can't do it with Cloudfale case.

[alexod]

Nick,

Checking Raw Logs for today only - Man I don't know, but it looks like a real users

https://prnt.sc/u9s3tw

[alexod]

You know what I did? I installed hotjar and recording the videos ... it looks like real users - "user" scrolling down - looks like they reading it, their activity looks like a activity of real user.

For 2 minutes I got 100 snapshots, 99% of the users from US, duration from 1:31 to 9 minutes

https://prnt.sc/u9t2sy

This looks like a "real traffic" ... but again I don't see any calls, submissions on website ... I don't think it is real traffic.