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I have a very small website, in a very competitive niche, that may receive a 100 hits a day, mostly for long tail keywords in blog posts. Yesterday and today I have been receiving dozens of hits per hour for the home page, where normally I might only have 2-3 hits per day for the home page.

The hits spend less than 15 seconds on the page, use different browsers, versions, resolutions and cities and are all direct (i.e., no referrals). There doesn't seem to be any common denominator to be able to identify or possibly block these hits.

From what I can determine, there's no real harm being done, unless it's simply to make my home page have a high bounce rate and negatively impact SEO.

Should I be concerned about these hits impacting SEO or is this some kind of penetration testing?

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    How is a high bounce rate going to hurt your SEO? Google doesn't use Google Analytics data for ranking. Google may use the bounce back rate of users returning to the search results, but these users aren't from search because they don't have a referral. See Does a site's bounce rate influence Google rankings?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented May 29, 2020 at 18:20
  • @StephenOstermiller not sure why Google wouldn't use every piece of data they could gather to improve their algorithms, including GA. My experience has been that direct hits from other sources like Facebook has sped up Google's indexing of my pages. Additionally, the same day as the above "attack", my SERP positions fell 10 positions for just about every page and haven't recovered. Coincidence?
    – Trebor
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 13:20
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    Not every site uses Google Analytics, so Google couldn't get complete data from it. Because they want webmasters to use it, they have promised not to use data from it for SEO purposes. Those things could very well be coincidence. Facebook campaigns often generate interest in your site that Google can see such as backlinks. It could be interesting to drive campaign traffic similar sites running GA and not, to test it as an SEO experiment.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 15:50
  • @StephenOstermiller, thanks. The only word from Google that I've seen is from 10 years ago. And that's the same company that said "There's no microphone in the Nest thermostat" right? :-) RE Google can read Facebook links. I'm sure it's possible, but I've never seen a FB link in any of the SEO backlink tools. There is an older study of whether GA tracking impacts position at seoblog.com/analytics-affect-rankings-seo. However, I think true test would require the exact same number and types of hits for each site for it to be an apple to apples test.
    – Trebor
    Commented Jun 7, 2020 at 19:33
  • Or a large sample size such using tens or hundreds of sites.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jun 8, 2020 at 9:27

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