Random Bursts of Traffic to Random Pages

[jbcobbs]

I see bursts of traffic to certain pages on my site ( I have a big site, 2 mil+ pages). For example a page will get 400 pageviews one day but no traffic ever besides that. Here are the details:

1. Pageviews will happen all at once in a short period of time
2. The visitor comes from google organic traffic via a relevant keyword
3. The referring domain is the same for every pageview in a burst but different from every other burst and is usually a high profile domain like IBM

Is this a hack attempt of some sort? Something else?

[goodroi]

I am not sure what you mean when you say the visitor comes from Google but the referring domain is a high profile site. If a visitor comes from Google then the referring domain is typically google.com.

Google has been known to throttle traffic based on time of day. Another possibility is scraper bots have been known to fake the referral data. It could throttling, scraper or something else.

How long has this been going on?
How do these visitors behave on your site?

[lucy24]

Human visitor or robot? The rough-and-dirty way to tell is by checking whether they pick up all subsidiary files, including the favicon unless it's a mobile UA.

[jbcobbs]

@goodroi: The traffic is from a google search with a normal search term. In analytics you can see the Domain and Service Provider attached to that traffic. Each spike has a different domain or service provider and originates from a different geographic location. Not sure how long its been going on but at least a couple weeks.

Here is an example of one of the spikes going to a single page:

394 pageviews from 1 unique visitor within an hour. Analytics shows this particular one having 10 unique pageviews (which i dont understand why) - 7 sec avg time on page. All spikes follow a generally similar pattern.

@lucy - Because of the search term(s), I thought human but we'll check that out. Thanks.

[johnmoose]

I have seen the same kind of burst traffic from 13th of Jan up to the 25th and then it kinda vanished.
Burst were up to about 500+ page reads on the same page from one visitor within a short period of time and with the same characteristics as the OP describes.
With a small piece of javascript it was detectable.

[jbcobbs]

I believe I have solved or at least identified the problem. After much digging around my analytics, I found that all of the bursts came from ie7/ie6 browsers. It seemed when viewing my site in one of those browsers a conflict occurred with AdSense ads (I think) causing the page to refresh over and over again.

@Johnmoose, let me know if you are having the same issue as it would give a little more validity to this and probably help out others that might have the same issue.

[johnmoose]

jbcobbs: At my site they were using the Safari5 browser and were hitting a page that did not (and still doesn't) exist. There was no conflict with any ads.