Thousands of visits a day from untraceable traffic to website - Serious issue
- by kel
At the end of January we noticed a spike in traffic to what JetPack stats says was home/archive page and what Google was classifying as going to /gaming/ which is an archive list in WordPress.
This started off as ~3,000 unique visitors and jumped up to 65,000 unique visitors in one day, again all to the "home" page. This happened over a course of a couple of weeks and we thought we were getting attacked.
The traffic then dropped off for a few days but then came back but came back as only about ~15,000 uniques a day and has been like that every day since. We came to the conclusion that something wasn't tracking right somewhere and this is legitimate traffic and brushed it off.
Now here comes the problem, Google AdSense has just disabled our account for "invalid clicks". We are trying to figure out where this traffic is coming from and stop it if it's not legitimate or figure out a way to track it correctly.
Specs for the site:
Dedicated server running CentOS 6 with nginx, php-fpm and MySQL. The site is built in WordPress and we use CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache. Analytics being used are Google Analytics, Quantcast, Alexa and Compete.
Any kind of help would be awesome.
UPDATE:
I'm finding more people with the same type of problem and there doesn't seem to be a solution.
http://netmeg.com/bot-attack/
http://stkywll.com/2012/03/02/annoying-cyborgs-attach-distort-analytics/
After looking at the access logs I noticed they were all CloudFlare IP's. I looked into that and found out CloudFlare acts as a proxy and there was a way to fix the logs in nginx. They are coming from many different ISP's in the US. They are going to /games/ or /gaming/ (/games/ redirects to /gaming/) and all seem to have the same user agent of Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0).
