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Indian traffic? Disable Adsense?

         

leebow

7:14 am on Jun 12, 2018 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Can I get some advice...

My site usually gets 90% USA / UK traffic.

About a month ago - Indian traffic started hitting just a specific sub-page of my site. I can’t work out if it’s bots or not. Analytics says the source is google - but I can’t find the page in google, and the “visitors” don’t seem to explore the site much - so I’m not sure who they are.

The thing is - if 150k visitors from the states went on the site - I’d get 2k Adsense clicks.

These Indian visitors - 150k visitors - would result in 6k Adsense clicks.

So I’m worried about my Adsense account. I’m not used to see such a high ctr. Especially on a single page. (Maybe that number of clicks is normal for india)

Also - I’m not sure - but I think this traffic is bringing my cpc down - on all my traffic?

Just any advice on what you would do in this situation would be great.

Thanks.

keyplyr

10:16 am on Jun 12, 2018 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



First, Adsense filters fraudulent clicks and click-bots are easily detected, so don't worry about it.

If you are asking how to block these hits, you'll need to examine your raw server access logs, not Google Analyitcs. GA is bad at identifying bots. If an agent fakes a browser UA and gives a referrer from Google India, Analytics believes it.

Examine these requests in you logs and write down the IP ranges. They likely will come from server farms (cloud hosting) if they are bots. If these hits prove to be from ISPs, then they may in fact be human.

Related links:

Search Engine Spider & User Agent ID Forum [webmasterworld.com]

Server Farm IP Ranges [webmasterworld.com]

Blocking Methods [webmasterworld.com]

lucy24

3:53 pm on Jun 12, 2018 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Gosh, how familiar this sounds. See, I have a long-standing redirect in place that looks like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} google\.co\.in
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)
RewriteRule ^ebooks/\w+/(?:\w+\.html)?$ http://example.com/boilerplate/redirect.php?newpage=%1 [R=302,L]
where /redirect.php is a page that says Oops, I’m sorry, blahblah, et cetera with a link to the originally requested page--which is almost never followed-up. Note that here it has to be a 302, or the browser will send them around in circles. I started doing this after noticing that humans from (specifically) India were landing on pages that had nothing to do with what they were looking for, with the result that they placed an extra load on the server--pages in this directory tend to have lots and lots of images--and all for nothing. (We all have our own standards when it comes to access control. Mine includes “Read the ### search snippet, willya?”)

I can’t work out if it’s bots or not.
Insert boilerplate about consulting raw access logs. Analytics won't even tell you whether they're actually requesting the page, let alone the supporting files that would identify the visitor as human.