Bot attack - bounce rate increased to 80 percent

[MrKOYO]

Hello,

For 3 days now, our shopify store has been under attack by bots, bots visit random pages and immediately leave. Each session lasts 0 seconds, so they were able to increase their bounce rate by 80 percent. most likely that in the future this will affect organic traffic from google.

how to deal with this?

@Shopify 

[KieranR]

Where are you measuring bounce rate? How is this affecting the business other than skewing an unfiltered vanity metric?

Generally I just filter out bots in Google Analytics and problem solved.

[MrKOYO]

We solved the problem with bots yesterday using cloudflare. 

As far as I understand, bots are launched by competitors to worsen positions in Google for certain products. Therefore, the higher the bounce rate the worse it is. The normal rate is 40-50%. during the attacks I had 90 percent

[KieranR]

Oh right, I assume you're measuring in Google Analytics or Shopify
analytics?

CF is able to stop bots reaching data collection in these web analytics JS,
however Google doesn't use this data as a rank signal. So I doubt the fix
did anything other than restore the bounce rate metric to normal. Bots
affecting bounce rate is not indicative of a negative SEO attack. It's
possibly just a side affect of whatever else they are doing.

If there is a bot based negative SEO attack, Google would be basing this on
'normalised' signals from SERPs. Things like result search dwell time,
return rate, query refinement rate after return, other result click after
return etc. Can't affect change there.

It's not a given that the bots were even a -ve SEO attack there are many
reasons you see bot traffic now and again. It's a pretty normal part of
having a website and mostly harmless.

[MrKOYO]

@KieranR 

We have read many forums and tutorials where SEO experts state that bounce rates affect organic traffic, as Google will continue to push up those pages that have a higher page quality. accordingly, if the bounce rate of a page is 100 percent, then they should, in theory, go to the worst positions and skip ahead of better pages. But this is in toriii, as in practice, I do not know.

Unfortunately, our store has been attacked by bots since December 19, and cloudflare could only help us for one day, a day later, apparently, the attackers rewrote the code, and the bots are attacking again.

To protect the store, we need a subscription from cloudflare enterprise o2o, it is fully integrated with shopify, and makes it possible to enable proxy in dns records. (Now this is not possible in a standard PRO subscription) The subscription price is very high from 2500 - 5000 USD per month, which is very expensive for small shops.

At the moment, Google's bounce rate is 82 percent, before December 19 it was in the range of 45-55 percent. More than 1,000 pages were affected in one week and all of them had a bounce rate of 100 percent. it's very sad