For the past 2 weeks we noticed that a site got a huge volume of (not set) traffic (location). It's not every day, but on days it happens it's literally the main geo with 30% of the overall traffic!
I add a secondary dimension (source/medium), and 99.5% of this traffic is direct. What does it means? Is it possible that someone is scrapping the site or something? I've never seen anything like that in 15 years of using GA. Thanks.
Best Answer
The geolocation normally depends on the source IP address. For whatever reason, there's this myths that IP addresses are bound to physical locations. Hint: THEY ARE NOT. Not at all. An IP segment can be found "in London" yesterday and "in Buenos Aires" tomorrow. Further more mobile cell phone service providers or ISPs can map the traffic coming from their internal network however they want. So you could open a website in Detroit, but internally your ISP routes it to their exit node in New York where your traffic enters the real WAN/ Internet for the first time, thus you suddenly being located in New York. Most of the IP/GEO location mapping also relies on historic data (short term), where an address is known to have been in Region A. When the IP gets assigned to Region B there can be overlaps, where traffic is wrongly mapped to a location while it's origin physically is a completely different one, which are corrected when the GEO location mapping data provider updates their list.
If your data has no source, then chances are high, that they are either coming from unknown/ not mapped IP addresses (or ranges), or just using proxies from proxy lists, proxy providers or the tor or similar network. So yes, it could be that your site is targeted. I'd inspect your webservers access logs and see what they are up to. Could be that it's just one of those automated scripts that people are running over IP ranges that extract web tech data to target specific bugs. Therefore I'd suggest that you update your public stuff asap, maybe block some traffic based on whatever you can identify as common denominator to get rid of it.