4

UPDATE2: Seems this all comes from Baidu crawlers, here's some outputcreated by GoAccess analyzing our logs. We've restricted the the following user-agent which seems to be used by them:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1

 Top visitor hosts sorted by hits - [avg. time served]

  2535 13 0.80%   13.18 MiB 123.125.71.42
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-42.crawl.baidu.com
  2526 13 0.80%   13.72 MiB 123.125.71.49
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-49.crawl.baidu.com
  2501 13 0.79%   12.86 MiB 123.125.71.17
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-17.crawl.baidu.com
  2501 13 0.79%   13.29 MiB 123.125.71.41
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-41.crawl.baidu.com
  2485 13 0.79%   13.22 MiB 123.125.71.40
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-30.crawl.baidu.com
  2484 14 0.79%   13.56 MiB 123.125.71.30
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-30.crawl.baidu.com
  2474 13 0.78%   13.01 MiB 123.125.71.18
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-18.crawl.baidu.com
  2464 13 0.78%   12.91 MiB 123.125.71.39
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-39.crawl.baidu.com
  2459 13 0.78%   13.26 MiB 123.125.71.44
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-44.crawl.baidu.com
  2441 14 0.77%   13.05 MiB 123.125.71.43
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-43.crawl.baidu.com
  2439 14 0.77%   12.99 MiB 123.125.71.12
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-12.crawl.baidu.com
  2434 14 0.77%   12.90 MiB 123.125.71.16
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-16.crawl.baidu.com
  2428 13 0.77%   12.81 MiB 123.125.71.45
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-45.crawl.baidu.com
  2427 13 0.77%   12.53 MiB 123.125.71.36
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-36.crawl.baidu.com


 Top visitor hosts sorted by hits - [avg. time served]

  2419 13 0.77%   13.03 MiB 123.125.71.33
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-33.crawl.baidu.com
  2419 13 0.77%   13.15 MiB 123.125.71.48
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-48.crawl.baidu.com
  2409 13 0.76%   12.40 MiB 123.125.71.34
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-34.crawl.baidu.com
  2408 14 0.76%   12.98 MiB 123.125.71.14
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-14.crawl.baidu.com
  2408 13 0.76%   12.76 MiB 123.125.71.47
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-47.crawl.baidu.com
  2402 13 0.76%   13.11 MiB 123.125.71.31
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-31.crawl.baidu.com
  2400 13 0.76%   12.85 MiB 123.125.71.20
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-20.crawl.baidu.com
  2387 13 0.76%   12.50 MiB 123.125.71.46
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-46.crawl.baidu.com
  2355 13 0.75%   12.40 MiB 123.125.71.15
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-15.crawl.baidu.com
  2340 13 0.74%   12.36 MiB 123.125.71.13
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-13.crawl.baidu.com
  2332 14 0.74%   12.12 MiB 123.125.71.38
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-38.crawl.baidu.com
  2320 14 0.74%   12.56 MiB 123.125.71.32
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-32.crawl.baidu.com
  2309 14 0.73%   12.46 MiB 123.125.71.19
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-123-125-71-19.crawl.baidu.com
  2247 13 0.71%   11.54 MiB 220.181.108.120
                              ~T~\ ~T~@ baiduspider-220-181-108-120.crawl.baidu.com

UPDATE: could it be coming from Baidu? Why would it then run the Google Analytics code? enter image description here

During the last few days there has been a huge surge in Google Analytics reported number of visits from China. Over 99% of these are a single page visit, which is really not how it is on our website. So obviously we suspect bots and something fishy going on but why would these be reported on Google Analytics? Does it make sense for them to run the GA script if they want to scrape us?enter image description here

Improve this question
7
  • 1
    You can confirm if this is real traffic by looking at your log files. It could be fake, I doubt it, but an important fact to mail down first. If it is real traffic, you can simply block the traffic. I assume that traffic from China is not something you care about. I could be wrong of course. If you want to block the traffic, note some of the IP address and create code to block the whole IP address block(s). Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 1:59
  • We're an international website and this bot is accessing our Chinese language pages so a global block isn't the solution. Now trying to figure out if Baidu have decided to change their crawl habits...
    – Collector
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 2:06
  • Okay. I gotcha!! There is a lot of abusive traffic from China and is often blocked if blocking is not a concern. Still, I would check your log files if you can so that you know more concretely what you are dealing with. BTW- Blocking bot traffic never translates to blocking users. However, in China, that rule may not always be true. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 2:10
  • Considering Baidu is the biggest search engine in China, I'd see the recommendation to block it not much different than suggesting to block Google Bot access. Our website has hundreds of millions of pages (due to catalogs and multiple languages) so this isn't a lot of crawling. The question and surprise was because the crawlers seemed to have activated the GA code hence mess the GA reporting.
    – Collector
    Commented Dec 23, 2016 at 17:27
  • For some, it depends upon what you care about. In the U.S., Baidu is of no value to us. Being a site with Chinese as a language, of course it is of value to you. Keep in mind, that the original question only asked if it could be Baidu. If it is, then I do not recommend blocking it. However, since there is a TON of abuse coming from China, we tend to be a little sensitive. As far as GA, you are right. I get your question now. It is surprising that Google is reflecting the traffic. This should not even who up. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Dec 23, 2016 at 22:03

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

You can check your hostname to see if there's some other website mistakenly put your GA code on his/her page.

The other possibility is that someone in China copied your page without changing your GA tracking code.

I had encountered both situation before.

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9
  • Thank you for your answer. Checking GA eliminates both options you've suggested. The hostname used is our domain. Interestingly, choosing "network domain" it can be seen the majority is from "baidu.com" and some more from "unknown.unknown" so I'm starting to suspect that Baidu might have changed their crawling habits.... ?!
    – Collector
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 2:00
  • Do you mind telling me your domain so that I can take a look with some tools that I have?
    – AGamePlayer
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 2:13
  • We're both colnect.com and colnect.cn and it's visiting the last one which is where our Chinese (simplified) pages are served. Let us know please which tools you use. Thanks.
    – Collector
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 4:01
  • chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/open-seo-statsformerly-pa/… I am afraid you just got some traffic from Baidu search. Did you check your ads account? Any lucy getting more revenue?
    – AGamePlayer
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 6:04
  • This isn't normal traffic coming from a search engine. All these sessions come from exactly the same area (China is big) and leave after viewing a single page. Confirmed with the server logs it's all from Baidu's own IP addresses.
    – Collector
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 18:38

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