Huge amount of mystery traffic

  • One of my clients has a WP site that is essentially in “archived” mode. It was once popular, but he hasn’t updated it for years (but we do keep WP itself updated). He recently noticed absurd amounts of traffic to some uninteresting, seemingly random 404 URLs on the site, like to

    /2001/05/11/42/feed/
    /blog/4/feed

    There’s also a large amount of mystery traffic to some old legit URLs, but not nearly as much as to these. The top visiting operating system on this site is from “Unknown” (37%). I noticed quite a bit of traffic from Russia and China, and have blocked those countries in .htaccess, but the mystery traffic to the strange URLs persists.

    What are common source of requests like these? Any best practices you guys would recommend?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Spam bots.
    Search Engine bots.
    I’d mainly say the first one. Spammer bots have been getting heavier lately, for some reason.

    I deal with over 400 a day on a forum I run.

    Thread Starter shacker

    (@shacker)

    Yeah, I figured it was bot traffic, but why would they be hitting read-only feed URLs? Any best techniques for dealing with them?

    Are they posting comments?
    If they bots are not doing anything other than viewing, there’s not much you can do, short of getting the IPs, and banning them.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    Don’t bother banning IPs. It’s never ending. I let the server’s firewall handle it.

    Thread Starter shacker

    (@shacker)

    Thanks guys. Sounds like it’s ultimately a fool’s errand. I’ll set up some firewall rules and leave it be. Would just love a glimpse into these spammers minds… to understand what they stand to gain by requesting the same 404s thousands of times over and over…

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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