Google ZOMBIE Traffic Observations

[samwest]

Mods Note: Split out of the October 2015 Monthly Observation thread into a separate Zombie Traffic Thread
---------------------------------
Sunday morning, usually banging away, but nothing but slow moving Zombie traffic, one or two at a time and sitting on the same pages for several minutes. Switch is currently OFF.
Still in decline. No sign of any seasonal upswing, which is way overdue.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 7:08 pm (utc) on Oct 19, 2015]

[mrengine]

Non-ecommerce site here, SERPs for my most impacted site have actually improved a bit in the past two weeks but converting traffic is DEAD. I watched some zombie traffic first hand yesterday that I can prove was not human as it was crossing over very distinct personal "genres" inside of this site. Unless this person was surfing with someone of the opposite sex with them, looking at personal issues and procedures that cross sex, illnesses and financing, this was most certainly a bot.

The bizarre navigation behavior is very similar to the abnormal paths I've seen. A common case I've seen is for a zombie to come from Google to our privacy policy page then disappear. These zombie visits also come from other countries where people don't natively speak English and they probably can't understand our privacy statement which is also written in English. I never see this abnormal activity on days where Google is working. When zombies are hitting us hard, normal traffic patters disappear. By normal I mean people visiting one of our various informative pages or product pages and some of them moving onto our store. Are you seeing a lot of zombies from Google country specific domains too?

[Simon_H]

@samwest Yes, that's the principle of retargeting. I guess someone's tracked history can give Google clues as to purchasing habits, but it may be dangerous to rely too much on this for new search queries. Either way, I think we're saying the same thing: that Google is potentially switching in and out qualified vs non-qualified traffic to sites. And the sites on this thread are seeing a high proportion of non-qualified traffic switched in.

Incidentally, we're a Google Certified Shop. So it makes no sense for Google to on one hand deny us good traffic and then on the other hand, stick a big tick next to us to encourage users to buy from us. And, again, anyone that starts seeing a lower VPC will reduce bids or pause campaigns.

If you mean Google is intentionally passing the good stuff to the big brands to encourage further investment, knowing that all the small businesses will reduce investment, that's a really really dumb thing for them to do. They would be wanting to expand/enrich/diversify their customer base to future proof the business, not bank on a small number of large brands. I think there's something else behind this.

[samwest]

If you mean Google is intentionally passing the good stuff to the big brands to encourage further investment, knowing that all the small businesses will reduce investment, that's a really really dumb thing for them to do.

That's not at all what I said. I said to the highest bidder. That could be anyone willing to bid high. I think it follows that the highest bidder gets the preferred position, but also better possibly qualified buyers while others get "less" qualified buyers?...not sure, only blind speculation. Just trying to address the problems other are describing in the same manner as always...speculation.

[mrengine]

That's not at all what I said. I said to the highest bidder. That could be anyone willing to bid high. I think it follows that the highest bidder gets the preferred position, but also better possibly qualified buyers while others get "less" qualified buyers?...not sure, only blind speculation. Just trying to address the problems other are describing in the same manner as always...speculation.

What you said about the highest bidder may apply to some here. But, I was the highest bidder on a fair number of keywords with buyer intent. On the bad days my paid and free positions remained the same. The one major thing that changed were sales. Whatever these low quality visitors are about is not some algorithm specifically targeting organic or paid. It's definitely hitting them both.

[Simon_H]

@samwest Sorry if I misquoted you. I automatically associated highest bidders with big brands, which isn't the case. It does seem though that this isn't about highest bidders or big brands or Google Certified Shops or only paid.

The evidence we have seems to be:
1) Sites are seeing on/off zombie traffic switching in and out, where 'good' traffic is indicated by good conversions and double/triple conversions over a short period, suddenly switching to 'bad' traffic that doesn't convert at all.
2) This is seen across both Google organic and paid, high bids, low bids, different niches, etc with no obvious trends. But not on Bing.
3) There is no change in traffic volume when conversions drop. In fact, many of us are seeing high traffic volumes during zero conversion periods.
4) I counted around 10 people posting about this. So it's a real phenomenon.
5) There is anecdotal evidence that some of this traffic is bots or fake/malicious humans.

The only explanation I can think of that supports the above is a combination of (1) fake/bot traffic hitting Google that it is failing to filter out (assuming it uses the same bot filters for organic and paid) and (2) Google working to traffic quotas such that the bot traffic is eating a big chunk of any quota that our sites are assigned.

[seoskunk]

If what is being seen is click bots I would expect to see spikes in traffic on bad days unless google enforce a traffic threshold. It was said earlier google were behind this. I find this scenario most unlikely as they would kill there market. However its all falling apart anyway. Maybe google is no longer the market it once was and buyers have drifted. Maybe google are toning down the thresholds of click fraud. Maybe its both, google needs growth or it fails, just maybe they have toned down click fraud software in an attempt to mask migration of buyers.

[il_ekom]

Head-scratcher: 20+ ecom sites, 1 adwords acct, $1.4M Google spend since 07. I have too much data. I began this journey on Overture in 04. I remember the good ole days. Current Organic notes: Down recently and keeps dropping. Quotas - yes IMHO. How can 20+ something sites get exactly 79 conversions per day? Or very close and not vary but a couple + or - ? And run that way for weeks at a time. Someone is turning the faucet on and off and this started many months ago. I also process and ship every order, 7 days a week for last two years+. I wish I was getting 79 per day now. Past weekend was lowest sales figures recorded since 04. Whatever Zombie was un-chained needs caught and caged. First day on this site. I was researching web-design and came across the posts about the recent trends. I thought my design needed attention or some kind of updating. Maybe it's the economy? Scratching-head. Current Adwords Notes: Support knows the SHTF. They monitor trends also. I paused ADW end of Aug. Conversion costs climbing. I think it started when the extensions first rolled out couple years ago. Support helped with account in Aug and provided some tips and tricks. Forcing advertisers to keep tweaking and run the business does not work. We need the set it and forget it that we had in the good years. I was hoping to roll out a killer-site-design and turn ADW back on and test supports new tips and tricks. Fingers crossed. This jerky up and downs will crash many a good ideas quickly. And the final missing puzzle piece->this: We have an old site with ancient software. Never advertised. Never had GA on it, never. It does 40-50% percent of our orders daily for several years now. We are afraid to change a picture on it. That ancient site has now pushed past the 50% daily conversions for us. We are re-designing our latest and greatest sites to look like the ancient one that converts so well. Is it color? Is it due to being 750px wide? Is it the fonts? Is it the color of the buttons? When that ancient site stops buying the groceries--- I will need a job. Averaging 22-23 conversions daily now last 5 days, organic. Down from the 79 average last several months. I will have to un-pause ADW to feed my kids.
October
Today 22 ---- I bet it quits here at 8pm central.
yesterday 23
17th 22
16th 22
15th 24 -- switch was flipped here at 12:01am
14th 38
13th 35
12th 47
11th 35
10th 33
9th 21
8th 31
7th 38
6th 44
5th 53
4th 26
3rd 28
2nd 38
1st 41

[Simon_H]

@seoskunk Totally agree. Yes, the 'traffic threshold' you mention is the 'traffic quota' I referred to. And Google would be crazy to be behind this, because click fraud (whether paid or organic) only discourages people from using paid. Which is why bots/fake traffic seem the only explanation, but that does seem a little far fetched.

[seoskunk]

Thanks il_ekom

Great first post, can I ask have you noticed any change in networks visiting the site during non converting times ?

[seoskunk]

Simon_H its entirely possible that google enforces a traffic quota by removing your site from personalised results when your quota is met. This would work for automated bots as well as they often use a browser.

So speculation 1 is google threshold traffic to your site.

Speculation 2 is that google are intermittently allowing suspect clicks on google through the filters. These bots previously not counted are now being counted depleting your adwords budget and traffic quota with zombie traffic.

Far fetched? Maybe but consider this I always thought crawl budget was bs until google admitted it in there ad for an seo

Experience in quantifying marketing impact and SEO performance and strong understanding of technical SEO (sitemaps, crawl budget, canonicalization, etc.).

[seroundtable.com...]
Source

[il_ekom]

@seoskunk
Have not had time to data dive. About 1/2 sites are wearing GA. About 1/4 sites are virgins with no GA. Last 1/4 sites had GA removed a year or so ago to see what happens because I noticed the rev-limiters some time ago. I speculated that the ancient site was invisible due to no GA and one of the reasons it gets un-throttled traffic. It's quite obvious the ancient site receives much more traffic and the main reason for the high conversions(No ad spend). You gotta keep in mind that the GA trackable sites are also wearing the conversion tracker code. I am totally perplexed for some time now about the fact there is exactly 79 shoppers in the 50 states that I ship to, that will buy any given day across 20+ sites. Organically speaking.

PPc is another subject and ..... My data is trying to tell a story there also.
I have the niche. I have the price. I have the keywords. I have sites on first page and I have sites at top of naturals for their keywords. I have the cart that works. I have the right color buttons. This used to be easy. And I have 29 conversions now at 9:02 pm central, so I lost the bet.

What caught my attention here on this site was the trends being described by several. I confirm the same trends here. Weekends used to be real hot for conversions. Now it's mon-wed. There has been a sudden shift in my data also. I don't know about Zombies or incoming networks right now, but if they know how to push an add-to-cart button and have a credit card, count me in. :-)

Call me a conversiaholic. Mine are down also. So I will re-design another site to make myself feel better. And start working on an email campaign for later this week to get my conversions back up.

And I am thanking someone above for telling me to pause back in Aug, after browsing the posts here. I am sure the Google Gods will clear us a path soon or their numbers will drop and heads will be chopped. There is such a thing as growing/expanding too fast. And big G is worrying too much about FB and probably making dumb decisions. FB's spot light may have blinded them temporarily. Who knows? The question becomes: can we afford to wait for them to change their diapers?

[glakes]

Excellent posts il_ekom.

I speculated that the ancient site was invisible due to no GA and one of the reasons it gets un-throttled traffic.

I also believe Google is using all of their products and services to determine how many conversions we have and may be cutting us off. Google Analytics, Adsense, Chrome, Gmail, API calls (fonts), YouTube videos all can send data back home. Those are the obvious data mining opportunities, but Google has even more through other services (DNS), fiber, etc. It would not be that hard for Google to determine when a conversion occurs, especially for out of the box shopping carts that direct users to a common successful order page.

Most of the people experiencing zombie traffic operate ecommerce websites. Unless Google and Amazon are in cahoots, whatever Google is up to may backfire. Stopping delivery of paid ads in Adwords and increasing my Amazon spend is how I am responding to Google's games. I'm not thrilled to be pumping money into Amazon, but when one door closes we have to look for the next open opportunity.

Going forward, and judging by your own testimony il_ekom, our best course of action may be to strip our sites of anything that phones home to Google. Doing so would leave their conversion quota threshold with incomplete data and we may experience similar results as your unthrottled "ancient" site.

@ seoskunk
Click bots are not why we are experiencing zombie traffic, unless it's Google running them. A couple good days of converting traffic per week from Google is what I see. On the zombie days, that have higher traffic than the good days, there is next to nothing. Sales remained relatively consistent for me up to and through August. Once September hit Google either sends a lot of sales 2-3 days per week and next to none on the remaining zombie days. If it were click bots inflating traffic on zombie days, where did all the sales go from the human traffic Google is supposed to be sending? The only explanation is that Google is the one flipping the switch. The question is what is the trigger that causes the switch to be flipped. Is it really conversions or are we missing something?

[Jez123]

So, if conversions are down for organic traffic and Adwords, where the hell are they going?

[Simon_H]

@glakes @jez123 The proposal we made about this being bot/fake traffic is based on Google allocating sites a daily organic traffic quota, much like budget in adwords. So the bot/fake traffic would eat a chunk out of this quota, reducing the proportion that is real traffic but would have minimal effect on total traffic.

A very simplified example of the traffic quota theory: There are usually 10,000 queries per day on a certain topic. Google allocates you 1% of this, i.e. 100 clickthroughs per day. Then one day, a person/bot runs 1,000 searches, and clicks heavily on your site in the serps. You end up with 110 clickthroughs per day (1% of 11,000) most of which are junk. So organic traffic goes up fractionally, but conversions go right down.

[aok88]

Yesterday Monday, a Panda and Phantom site of ours had zero conversions! That has not happened in decade for this site, regardless of Google's updates. But traffic was exactly the same. Unbelievable.

[glakes]

The proposal we made about this being bot/fake traffic is based on Google allocating sites a daily organic traffic quota, much like budget in adwords. So the bot/fake traffic would eat a chunk out of this quota, reducing the proportion that is real traffic but would have minimal effect on total traffic.

In this context I can see where it is quite possible. Forgive me for my prior statement as it was not based under this theory.

Consider this though... Google has invested heavily in reducing click fraud, and I have invested in bot/scraping blocking technology too. Neither Google or my own server side solutions are blocking this Google zombie traffic. And today I'm off to a great start: Google.mu, Google.ca, Google.gr, etc. Outside of the few Canadians that buy from us (less than.05%), everything Google is throwing at my site is a waste of bandwidth.

For Google to be applying a quota, which is skewed by bot traffic, the remaining real people have to go somewhere. In the past my adwords rank did not change much and organic was and still is stable every time I check. And I check from different IP addresses. If my ranks have not changed, where are all the real people going? And why is this problem all of a sudden hitting a fair number of us if it is some external force outside of Google's control?

[Jez123]

AccuRanker can see huge changes today on 20th October across Europe, but especially the States:

I wonder if the slow and odd conversions have been down to this. I often see poor conversions before an update that then settle back to normal levels after. Possibly removal or additions of filters. Perhaps. I nteresting that Australia hasn't been apparently affected.

[Simon_H]

@glakes Yes, there are many unanswered questions! The only thing we can say with *some* certainty given all the reports on this forum is that the traffic quota theory seems to be true, i.e. that the volume of traffic a site gets seems separate from the quality of traffic a site gets.

What isn't clear is the nature of the 'bad' traffic. One theory is that it's bots that Google is failing to filter, hence eating into the traffic quota. Another is that it's real traffic albeit low quality (e.g. searches where Google has low confidence in result matching) and Google is passing huge amounts of it to sites that fulfil certain criteria whilst retaining the 'good' traffic for others sites. There does seem to be a quality element here (5 out of 6 sites that have seen this phenomenon and responded to me have been hit by Penguin), i.e. sites that Google thinks have quality issues are getting a disproportionately high amount of the junk traffic switched in. It makes a lot of sense for Google to do this.

[netmeg]

Hundreds of sites over the past twenty years, some seasonal some not, some ecommerce some not, some with high traffic and some not, and have never seen anything I could pin on "zombie traffic". Bots, yea - tons and tons of bots and even bot attacks. Niches that die off or that are saturated or see increased competition. Multiple technical mistakes, some minor some severe, made by clients and even by me. But no zombies.

So - why not?

[edited by: netmeg at 12:58 pm (utc) on Oct 20, 2015]

[Awarn]

I haven't seen many sales from Amazon lately either, I think a lot of the issue anymore is the browsers or how bots read sites. I had a site that showed up fine but apparently Google couldn't read it. I made some changes and have huge spikes in data downloaded.

[Jez123]

I haven't seen many sales from Amazon lately

I have stopped selling on Amazon so I can't comment but that's very interesting to me. I have also slumped in repeat orders. Maybe people are just saving for Christmas.

[samwest]

So - why not?

'cause Meg ain't afraid of no ghosts!

[reseller]

Hi folks

Revisiting my post (Msg#4772314 of Oct 14, 2015) on this thread regarding prediction of Google Zombie Traffic for 7 days .

Here is a Google Zombie Traffic Forecast for the next 7 days:

Thursday 15th Oct.: Healthy traffic
Friday 16th Oct.: Zombie traffic
Saturday 17th Oct.: Zombie traffic
Sunday 18th Oct.: Zombie traffic
Monday 19th Oct.: Zombie traffic
Tuesday 20th Oct.: Healthy traffic
Wednesday 21st Oct.: Healthy traffic

Has it been a correct prediction so far ?

[wgchris]

No good traffic for me yet today. But the rest of the dates are correct. Again, this site is small and sees little traffic but should get conversions daily.

Slightly off topic but noteable, chatting with an ad pro at this moment: majority of their display network campaigns are being delivered incorrectly or not performing. Sounds like G has all sorts of issues.

I've also gone ahead and wrote G through AdWords and told them that I have paused all campaigns until converting traffic returns. Looking forward to a phone followup. :P

[Tourz]

My pet theory is that G shapes traffic quality based on advertiser profile ie recent browsing history and communications.

For example, if I stay up too late surfing online, stumble upon iffy sites, or swear in an email, we get no customers the following day or two. But it usually plays catchup afterward. After more than a decade of rising ppc & organic sales, its pretty obvious when radio silence strikes and the usual cause/effect.

I think the Gbot is a control freak, but in a good way perhaps.

[isellstuff]

I'm skipping most of this thread, but I'm surprised after the first page there wasn't a clear explanation... I've mentioned this a couple of times on WebmasterWorld, but here goes again. Pay attention...

Google is bucketing traffic. They are bucketing it by the search term's implied placement in the purchase funnel. They are doing it via their Shopping Widget. The more specific a search is, the more likely the shopping widget is going to show and consume most of the searchers attention. Are they purposefully taking the valuable traffic, yes, without a doubt, but, it is a by product of trying to keep their shopping advertisers happy. They must provide conversions for their shopping PPC advertisers. They prefer shopping ads versus regular Adwords PPC because GOOGLE has control of the keyword set that shows the ads. Think about that... They don't have to worry that a particular advertiser has missed some key, early purchase funnel terms that are very high volume. They now have control... But, there is a tradeoff. They MUST provide conversions to maintain advertisers. So they MUST route profitable traffic through the shopping widget so that they can also route non-profitable traffic through the widget.

Zombie traffic just means that the Shopping Widget is getting all the high converting traffic. This is what happens when a merchant uses Google conversion tracking. They give away the keys to the kingdom and now Google knows the true value of all search terms.

I've been playing this game for a very long time. I am 100% certain this is the source of Google e-commerce zombie traffic. We always had zombie traffic. We just used to have higher value traffic as well. No more, unless, for some reason, Google decides that people aren't in a buying mood. That's the other thing... There is an inverse correlation between paid conversion rates and natural search zombie traffic. Google has real-time conversion data... Think about that.... You need to keep shopping advertisers happy, your real-time conversion data says conversions are bad, then you reduce the shopping widget exposure to minimize negative reactions from shopping advertisers. So we get a trickle of semi-decent traffic in the natural SERPS.

You have to think about this from Google's perspective.... They have a PPC program that is a license to print money, but they must produce results!

[aok88]

@isellstuff That makes a lot of sense. But there are still plenty of companies and sites making a lot of money via organic traffic. It's not like everyone has this problem, it's just us poor souls. I'd like to know how to signal that our site deserves more profitable traffic and less zombie.

[blend27]

but they must produce results!

And they do, for most of this year the traffic from Malaysia, Iceland, Brasil, South Africa and Republic of Zaire is always BOTs, Guestbook Spam or Semalt(and such).

Starting this year shopping season(well, every year), I get more traffic from those countries on several US-Ecom based sites in 1.5 month than the rest of the year.

1 Page hit, 99.9% of them with valid Goog Referrers,

I don't rely on any analytical packages other that my own, written by me, real time data.

....saying it for years now

[Simon_H]

@isellstuff It's a shame you skipped most of the thread. If you'd have read it, you'd have seen that those of us that use paid are seeing the same behaviour there too on the same days. There's no inverse correlation as you suggest where organic zombie days = high CR rates on paid. Quite the opposite. We use Shopping and are a Google Certified Shop and are seeing exactly the same zombie phenomenon on both at the same time.

And it doesn't explain why zombie traffic seems to switch on and off, someones every day or two, sometimes a couple of times within a day. If the phenomenon was due to the shopping widget appearing on high confidence searches, then the conversion rate on organic would stay relatively constant.

[wgchris]

@isellstuff Simon_H is correct. Same bogus traffic through paid and organic. Stuck in purgatory. Can't even buy our way out.