3379% Increase in traffic... this can't be good.

Well, it wasn't. Everyone gets excited when traffic increases on their website.

But if you can't explain why this happened, then this is probably not good.

So, I decided to check my analytics yesterday, and noticed a weird increase in traffic. I thought at first this could have been because I had a reddit post that gained some good traction, but that wasn't the reason why this happened.

The timing was not right as the traffic had increased before that post.

As I am not technical (well, "semi" I know how to google stuff😅) I asked my hosting provider for help, and on their end everything seemed alright.

Not conviced by that answer, I decided to try to look more into it. I needed to know where the traffic was coming from.

So, I found out that you can see the geo location of your traffic in google analytics.

That big amount of traffic was coming from one place. Aushburn-VA.

So, what did I do to stop these spam bots?

I googled "can I block traffic from a specific region in cloudflare?"

Turns out you can.

I googled the IP for the Aushburn region. (Not sure if this completely covers that whole city, since there are probably plenty of IPs there.)

And I set up a rule in clouflare to block traffic from that IP.

That worked almost instantly.

The result is the image above.

What is the lesson to this story?

Well, keep track of your analytics for any weird behaviors. If you can't explain why something happened, then you should try to find out the reasons using the tools at your disposal.

I have no idea of what the impact of this could be if it had continued, my hosting provider told me that the main issue that could arise would be with adsense. So, if you do have adsense and notice something weird like this, then you should definitely look into it.

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Anyways, I had this happen yesterday, so I thought I would share it in case something weird like that happens to you.

Have a great weeked.