Ask HN: Google spike of direct traffic

[_ud4a]

over the past 2 weeks we've seen a very high spike in direct traffic to our site.

i've attached pictures below:

http://i40.tinypic.com/1zv3jn4.jpg

http://i39.tinypic.com/15qogop.jpg

we basically jumped from 5000 a day to 15000 a day with most of the increase being targetted towards only 2 of our pages with high bounce rates and small "avg time on site".

any one else experience this? i look at the logs and the traffic is not from one IP. the top 30 big hitters are all different IP and subnets.

any google experts willing to shed some light on this?

Thanks!

[kristianp]

Direct traffic has nothing to do with google and if it's only two pages, it's probably not a search engine.

You should be able to check analytics for the user-agent, legitimate search robots have an identifiable user agent string. Can you give more information about the nature of those two pages?

[cheae]

Is it organic traffic from Google? or Direct traffic? You mentioned both in your question.

If it is organic traffic from Google, we too noticed a change in Google traffic around that date to our various sites. It may be a recent change in Google algorithm worked in favour of your pages.

[_ud4a]

it's direct traffic. they are mainly hitting 2 pages on our site.

the organic traffic from google has been consistent going up and down slightly which is normal.

however the direct traffic shot up from 1100 to 14000 a day!

i'm not too worried now since it's not eating too much bandwidth but it could cause an issue soon by bogging down all the bandwidth.

in my robots.txt i have: User-Agent: * Disallow: /rate.php Disallow: /ratewp.php Disallow: /brokenLink.php Disallow: /download.php

should i restrict the user-agent to only bing, google and yahoo to see if that might be it?

the fact that it's all US based IPs is what's weird.

[trienthusiast]

can it be an image search ?

[_ud4a]

i don't think so cause it's only hitting 2 pages consistently.