Spike in traffic. Google crawling?

[Samuel_Walpole]

Hi all,

I've got a question more out of curiosity than anything else. Hopefully this is the right section to ask.

I have a Shopify store based in the UK, and I only advertise to UK customers. However, I occaisionally see a spike in traffic from California, USA. Normally, I'll get several hundred visits within a minute. The only explaination I can come up with is that perhaps this is Google crawling my site? Does that seem at all reasonable? Does anyone have any other ideas?

If that is the case, is there any way to remove this traffic from my stats? Since it's skewing my data.,

[Lisa]

Hi, Samuel! 

Lisa here from the Shopify Support Team. 

This is very odd, however not uncommon for stores to get traffic from other countries like this. Especially when some of your keywords start to trend, or if you have any SEO optimization apps. You can usually see in the referrer source if it is coming from a bot or not. 

If you did want to block every country from your store except the UK, this is an option! The IP blocker app can help you with this. 

I can understand how frustrating it must be that these visitors are skewing your data. On any plan, you can filter reports, to separate the data by country. Currently, there is no way of removing traffic from your main stats. 

If you want to generate custom reports to avoid seeing visitors outside of the UK, you can think about switching to the Shopify Plan or the Advanced Plan, if you are not on one of these plans already. The Shopify and Advanced plans allow you to build custom reports. 

An extreme option is you can hide certain pages from Google, however, this is not ideal as you want to still be searchable for the UK! To find what pages you'd want to hide if you did go down this route, I suggest installing Google Analytics. This will allow you to find what pages are getting the most traffic from the non-UK users. 

You have a good ranking on google, you show up on the first page when searching 'Norfolk cycling', and I'm looking from North America.

On a wild, non-technical guess, a lot of Californians - especially San Francisco love to cycle and travel abroad... Perhaps it is real traffic and you have a market there! Do you have any products which are trending right now or unique for the US traffic? Perhaps when you look into your Google Analytics this will give you more insight into where these Californian visitors are coming from and going to! Then you can utilize this information.

Hope this helps, feel free to let us know if you find the source of all this US traffic. 

Best, 

- Lisa 

[Brad_Redding]

Samuel - in Google Analytics, check the hostname of this traffic to see if it is your own URL. You can do this through a secondary dimension on your behavior > page reports. If it's not your domain then it's probably a bot of some sort (it would likely be (not set)  if this is the case. 

[Steven_Joseph1]

Thanks, Lisa. Your suggestion is best.I faced this type of problem many days ago but now I have solved this problem.

[yasirkhan]

Hi, would you please share the solution for this? 

[helmandoar]

Thanks Brad, this seems to be the most accurate answer IMO.