Sudden Spike in Chinese Traffic

[chubes]

At the start of this month, I noticed an RPM drop on my site while traffic remained stable. I thought this was because I switched to WordPress multisite, so I reached out to Mediavine.

As it turns out, there has been a sudden spike in traffic to my site from China and Singapore. It is all direct, desktop traffic with very low engagement time.

Currently, Singapore is the city sending the most traffic to my site. Shanghai is in the top 10.

Mediavine rep said they have noticed this happening with a few sites lately, and have been looking into it on their end.

Anybody experiencing something similar on their sites? How are you planning to deal with it?

I am wondering whether to block the countries entirely. Or to find out the exact source and plug it there.

 

[Darth]

BOTS are currently just going absolutely mental, crawling and ingesting everything they can via AI. It's insane. It's the same thing everywhere, and others have spoken about it too.

 

[chubes]

BOTS are currently just going absolutely mental, crawling and ingesting everything they can via AI. It's insane. It's the same thing everywhere, and others have spoken about it too.

So is the move block them or serve them markdown content? Haha

I want as many AIs to read my shit as possible but not if it's just pure spam that will fuck with my advertisers.

 

[CCarter]

move block them

How would you block them?

 

[chubes]

How would you block them?

First I would enable GeoIP at the server level, then I would add a rule to .htaccess to block traffic originating from China (or any other country).

Since I'm on Cloudways, this is the process for me:

https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/5126366-how-to-use-geoip-with-your-application

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-FORWARDED-COUNTRY} ^CN$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [F,L]

Note that if you are already using Rewrite rules in your .htaccess, you don't need the first line of the above code.

Cloudflare also provides a way to do this via WAF, but it's a paid upgrade.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases/block-traffic-from-specific-countries/

Also, after doing more research, I saw some people mention that the traffic still shows in analytics after blocking it with Cloudflare.

I just implemented the above rule in my .htaccess, as I admittedly just learned how to do this in response to your question haha. We'll see if this stops it.

If it works well I will likely also add Singapore, but that traffic seems to have slightly better metrics, so it may not be pure bots.

I am thinking that having a high percentage of Chinese traffic could cause ad revenue to dip because advertisers may see that as a sign of a low value site.

At the very least it skews your analytics data, especially average engagement time and RPM.

 

[CCarter]

analytics data

What analytics software are you using?

If stuff is still hitting even after you block it then it could have just been Google analytics spam, and the traffic was never on your site.

 

[chubes]

What analytics software

Google Analytics. And yes, it seems to be that way because it's still hitting my site.

I can filter it out in GA directly.

But then the question becomes, WHY?

 

[Ryuzaki]

But then the question becomes, WHY?

If you look at the referrer sometimes they’ll have a “ghost host” that’s like “buylinks.me” or whatever. And it’s just a numbers game targeting webmasters. They’ll do the same with anchor text spamming too.

 

[B0bbyland]

The same thing happened to a website of mine. However, it happened for about 3 days then nothing after. All the track went to the home page and no where else.

 

[chubes]

So, the .htaccess rule didn't work. And the traffic continued to ramp up over the past few weeks.

But I did find something on Cloudflare that seems to actually be blocking it.

Security -> Security Rules

Create a rule:

Country = China or Singapore

Block

 

[The Engineer]

I woke up to the forum posting an error. A certain MySQL table is filling up and only being emptied once an hour. Without getting into the details, the reason is is that we're getting slammed by bots, largely from Singapore. This is going on right now as I type this with over 4,000 live bots in the past ~15 minutes (and climbing) since I rebooted the server as a quick fix, which hadn't been done in a while.

I ended up going straight into the server's analytics instead of Google to check the bots. The question arose in the thread of "why" are sites being slammed by these Chinese bots. I've got your answer:

Bytespider = ByteDance's AI crawler
PetalBot = Huawei's spider for the Petal search engine
Baiduspider = Baidu's search engine spider
plus below...

...and then a bot I can't identify but determined it's coming out of Singapore and is by far the worst offender. And with some Googling I'm seeing that it's Tencent just ignoring all robots.txt directives, and even using residential proxies to get around country wide blocks.

I'll also say that there's no reason Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic need to be eating as much bandwidth or more that Google. They might get the block, too.