zombie-ish traffic - How to really analyze my site traffic?

[thewealthbuilder]

Hi,

As we all know many sites are now receiving "Zombie-ish" traffic that inflates the stats, and we don't know whether it's Google that is sending that traffic deliberately or not.

The problem is , I can't really find out whether Panda/Penguin has hit me until I get absolute real stats. OR , if one is receiving Zombie traffic, one should assume that his site has already been penalized ?

Also, if Penguin penalizes a domain, does the sub-domain also get penalized ?

[tedster]

This is more of an analytics challenge than anything else. Just because traffic is non-converting doesn't mean it's not real ;)

One tool you might consider using for deeper insight into visitor behavior is boomerang.js - see [yahoo.github.com...]

That might tell you if your zombie traffic is acting like "real users" or not.

[Robert Charlton]

twb - A thread discussing this strange traffic that you may be describing has been extremely active in our Analytics forum since February of this year. The effect has been perplexing a lot of really good people here for quite some time now....

Logs Show Surge, but Not Human?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/4420174.htm [webmasterworld.com]

I assume that a good number of the participants in the thread are unlikely to have been affected by Penguin... nor do I think that Panda affected many in the group. AdSense penalization because of inflated traffic stats appears to be a bigger concern among those posting.

The traffic discussed in the thread may be a bot net of some sort. Note that while this conceivably could be related to the "Zombie traffic" that's been discussed on and off in this Google forum for several years, descriptions of it differ enough that, to avoid confusion, I'm going to change the title of the thread we're now on to a more qualified "Zombie-ish traffic" (as you described it in the post), rather than "Zombie traffic" in the posted title.

Also... for the current discussion on "classic" Zombie traffic, see another discussion here in our forum, which will help you identify some of the patterns. Not a good place to ask about individual site analytics, but a good place to get a background on patterns people have seen....

Zombie Traffic and Traffic Shaping - Analysis
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4437835.htm [webmasterworld.com]