If you’ve noticed an increase in traffic from these two countries over the last month or so, you’re not alone. It’s mostly spam traffic and is skewing the overall picture of Google Analytics for pretty much everyone. Spammers do this kind of stuff for various reasons. Unfortunately, it adds more work to our list of tasks.
Spam traffic hits will eventually die off once Google figures out how to block the spam bots. Until then, you'll probably want to clean up your Google Analytics reports.
There are a number of ways of ‘removing’ this traffic or hiding it. In the meantime, you could filter it out in Google Analytics. But if you monetize your website with display ads or you’re interested in the conversion rate optimization of your e-commerce store, these spam visits might be a real headache and could be affecting your ad revenue RPM.
These bots stand out because the Bounce Rate is very high, Pageviews are generally no more than one, and Avg. Session Duration is one or two seconds. This kind of traffic is useless. Time to get rid of it.
The easiest way to block these bots is to use a firewall rule in CloudFlare. I’ll discuss CloudFlare here as it’s the most popular and versatile CDN and firewall tool. But you can adapt these instructions to your own service.
- Open CloudFlare and click on Security
- Click WAF
- Select Create Firewall Rule
- Give it a descriptive name like “Block Czechia, Seychelles, Russia bots”
You can create a firewall rule for each country or use the OR boolean operator to check for all countries in the same rule.
Here's how it should look:
Under “Then…”, the part where the action is chosen, you've got a number of choices but I recommend using Managed Challenge, as this allows real users to access the site but it should prevent bots from passing the firewall.
You can then see how much traffic is blocked by CloudFlare and completely block all traffic if you think too much is getting through.
