Am I under a sophisticated negative SEO attack?

[RBT]

I have a 1+ year old site in a competitive semi-YMYL niche. I am bit of an authority in my niche (from my day job) so i am getting decent backlinks and traffic growth has been healthy.

However, a few months ago I noticed that I am getting bot traffic on my #1 page from Google Search! The bot searches for a weird long-tail query that doesn't make much grammatical sense, lands on my page 20% of the time and then immediately bounces.

At first I ignored it but now it is happening on my #2 page as well. I know its a bot because:

1. The traffic comes from some countries which otherwise should have no traffic. I know some comes from the US as well but that is harder to isolate.
2. There is an inmediate bounce. I track this using scroll depth.

What has me concerned is I see no reason why bots would come from Google Search and then immediately bounce. It means someone is trying to manipulate google SERPs or make it seem like I am trying to do that! Both of those attacked pages rank at the top of google for lucrative keywords.

Is it possible someone is trying to fool google into thinking that I am using bots to increase SERP click-through or something to rank higher? Has anyone heard of something like this?

I searched around and apparently some people sell services where they will send 1000 organic traffic to your site for 6 dollars. Someone seems to have used that service and targeted my site to get it penalised?

 

[CCarter]

Or it’s a rank tracker or software like CORA SEO that is scraping the content of your web page daily since you are ranking high for lucrative keywords.

Most negative SEO attacks involve dirty backlinks. Random bots visiting top website - that has been going on since the dawn of the internet.

Most likely they just downloading your content, probably for analysis of some sort.

 

[RBT]

Thanks, that does make sense.

I assume such bots won't trigger scroll depth triggers on Google tag manager and still be able to scrape the whole page? Probably because they read directly from the page source code?

Speaking of dirty backlinks, I have some of them from domains that are "parked for free" on godaddy. Not a lot though - maybe 5-10 domains. So I just chalked that up to usual internet BS.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I assume such bots won't trigger scroll depth triggers on Google tag manager and still be able to scrape the whole page? Probably because they read directly from the page source code?

Most won't execute Javascript at all. They grab the source code and that's all they need. They won't load images and CSS and JS files. Just the HTML source code. Some of these newfangled analysis tools probably execute Javascript though, which sucks for those of us who'd like accurate analytics.

Speaking of dirty backlinks, I have some of them from domains that are "parked for free" on godaddy.

That means the sites are now down, so those backlinks are down too. No worries there.

 

[secretagentdad]

There’s a lot of people crawling a lot of stuff these days.
Once you hit 10k a day the bots start to really show up.


I don’t take anything to seriously anymore. All the robots wanna sign up and look around if you have a sign up form. What eves maybe they smart enough to see value in how we doing things.

Lots of starts ups trying to make search engines and index’s and stuff.
if I can let them explore they tell people about how great your tool is.

Ranking small audience search engines is actually a surprisingly big channel for me.

Just don’t let them post links and you won’t really have trouble.

The big difference between google and everyone else right now is they seem to be able to handle 3 layer uis rather well.