In the past few weeks, Fasturtle noticed that our website and many others were all receiving a sudden influx of referral traffic. But it wasn’t the good news that it might appear to be.

Sudden, massive amounts of traffic from foreign and unknown websites 5 to 10 times the amount of normal monthly traffic caused our team of digital marketing experts to look into this further, and here is what we have found.

(Pictured Above is an Example of the Traffic Spike Magnitude)

Where is the Spam-Like news.grets.store Coming From?

By doing a quick IP address lookup, you’ll find that many of the fraudulent websites that are sending traffic such as; news.grets.store, rida.tokyo, kar.razas.site, are all located in the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and other surrounding European countries, which for an American business almost any amount of traffic would be considered spam.

Why is this Happening?

These recent spam attacks across many websites is yet another attempt by ill-intentioned scammers who are hoping that you will notice their website, and have you download malware, viruses, buy fraudulent products, or steal your personal information.

Fasturtle heavily recommends that you do not click on or visit any of the websites you might encounter from this situation.

What Can Your Digital Marketing Agency Do in This Situation?

Luckily, this type of traffic spam attack is not very harmful, but does throw off your tracking numbers and makes it more difficult to see your true website traffic numbers. 

The first step to rectify the situation is by blocking the referral sources. There are a number of ways to do this, such as blocking the specific IP address or location, filtering out the data in Google Analytics, and various other methods that your website team can utilize. 

Make sure to stay in contact with your website or hosting team, to stay in the loop and up to date with the latest developments. While this traffic surge would have been impossible to prevent, you can take steps to prevent it from continuing to happen.

Will This Impact Your Business Going Forward?

Unfortunately, most tracking software’s will not be able to filter out the spam traffic data collected during this short time period, causing a constant reminder of this surge. But once the sources have been blocked, they will not continue to show up or disrupt your marketing efforts.

Just make sure to remember this, when 6 months down the line you are wondering why your referral traffic is down 500% in the last few months.

If you have seen similar spikes in referral traffic on your website, or if you have any other questions about how this might affect your business moving forward, contact Fasturtle, a leading digital marketing agency, to answer any questions or concerns you may have.