Bounce Rate Goes 10% to 90% in 3 Months

You are getting referral spam. It's just useless bot traffic.

I wouldn't worry about the bounce for that traffic. It's not real people.

The bounce rate reported in Google Analytics does not have an impact on rankings, so it is nothing to worry about.

Mike ,

I have read many of your posts and thank you for taking the time to respond.

I have attached a new view as the google Organic traffic is %50, Where as the referral spam traffic is obviously much much higher.

The strange thing is the increase in user sessions came about around May 23rd

Attachment 22929

Here is that graph.


Where is the referral spam coming from and can I block this? Is this some dumb competitor trying to sabotage me?

I don't understand why this has happened?

Attachments are broken here, so I can't see any of that. You need to host the image somewhere else and then embed it in your message.

[img=http://s22.postimg.org/dzytium3h/All_Traffic_Source_Medium.jpg]


[img=http://s7.postimg.org/9iy3kjp2v/Bounce_Rate.jpg]

Narrow that down to the middle of June through the end of July to see what sources are actually bringing the bounces.

EDIT: Nevermind, for it to be that high and based on the amount of traffic from each source, a lot of it has to be coming from organic results.

There are a few things to check out. I would start with load times. Is the site loading slower than normal? Did you make any changes that might cause slower load times? If the site is taking 10 seconds to load, people might be bouncing right away, especially if a lot of your traffic is mobile.

I would also look for an increase in traffic for a specific keyword or keywords. This is more challenging since Google went private search with everything. You might find some insights in Webmaster Tools though. I have seen cases where a site, for whatever reason, starts ranking for something irrelevant or perhaps something that is similar in topic but not really what searchers are looking for. If the traffic is significant, that will throw a wrench in bounce rates.

I would also see if you can narrow down the bounce sources and check their time on the site. If it is largely coming from one or two keywords and the time on the site is only a second or so, it could be someone using a bot of some kind.

Those are places I would start.

Source and Mediums June 15th to July 23rd

I have faced and solved the exact same problem that you are having. All you have to do is block the traffic that is coming from those spammy websites. Here is a detailed tutorial for this: Tiny Factor that Shoot Up My Bounce Rate

I have blocked the spammy sites using the htaccess file like mentioned above. Will be interesting to see how that affects the visits

I think I did it correctly and will continue to block them.
I didn't block Semalt yet , what is Semalt?