Traffic has suddenly gone Chinese!
 

Hi guys, long time lurker here on the forums, but finally got up the nerve to come in and post. :thumbsup (love this community btw).
So, not sure exactly what is going on, but I run a VR Porn affiliate site that was doing quite well until a few months ago, and I noticed a few errors and issues but perhaps most surprisingly is almost all my traffic is now coming from Chinese sources, rather than English/American.
I have everything set properly in Webmaster Tools, so I am a bit baffled as to what is going on.

Any ideas?

What is source of your traffic? Can you post your site link?

Traffic is nearly all organic, some trickling through from Twitter (had FB shutdown a few weeks ago due to spam reports).
I'm still a little unsure about posting my URL here. I will PM you.

Edit: I'm a total noob here, not sure how to PM?

Ok, I guess I can't PM until I have more posts.

Is there some other way I can get ahold of you in private for advice?

Go to https://gfy.com/profile.php?do=editoptions

and enable Enable Private Messaging.

Ok, I'm an idiot. I guess I had the site posted on my profile the entire time (I have since removed).

Sorry if I annoyed or offended you, I'm just trying to get some help and my previous lurking was minimal, so I'm still not used to these forums.

Anybody?

Edit: nvm, just seen your newest post. Apparently patience isn't a virtue of mine either lol. Will enable PM now. (God I need sleep lmao).

Ok, there is no private messaging option, but there is visitor messaging; which, I assume, must be what you are talking about.
Still though, that isn't private either...

Is there really no PM feature on this board?

(I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to try to help btw) :upsidedow :)

Ok, seems like you need more posts to enable this option. You can contact me via contact form on my site.

If it's Chinese it's very likely bot traffic. Do a reverse lookup on the IP of some if you can and you'll often find they come from servers belonging to Baidu or Alibaba.

Thanks. 48% of the Chinese traffic is coming from (direct) in Analytics and 20% is/was from Baidu. Nearly all the rest is broken up from various other countries.

In the process I noticed that my (organic) data in Analytics has nearly dried up completely. I guess I'm not in the serps anymore for anything really, at least not in the top 100 for 99% of my keywords.

Really not sure what is going on. I have content that is easily on-par with my competitors, and I can see a steady decline in traffic going over the last few months.
I have no manual actions in WT...

This is/was my main money site. A year ago it was making close to 2k on some months, between 800 and 1000 on others. Would be extremely grateful if somebody here could lend a hand helping me figure out what's wrong.

Not sure what else to do!

Hi jerkules, assuming you are speaking of the site in your sig, I sent you a message there just a few minutes ago. Thanks again. :)

Send your site to my Skype, I will take a look ;)

many sites on our network are under constant attack by Chinese IPs. i've seen several different types of attacks - password cracking, click jacking, and even straight up ddos. we get millions of rogue hits per day.

this is the world we are living in. you need to get on a host that can handle it. you're probably being penalized in one of many ways for the Chinese hits.

in your situation, your domain may have been blacklisted at the affiliate or google because of the Chinese hits. one thing i saw a client do was redirect all Chinese traffic to google. then he wondered why his PR dropped.

you have to either block that traffic or offload it (not to google). we actually block all of China, but their telecoms issue new IPs every week. i'd have a chat with your host. they might be able to plug in a network-level firewall cheap. everyone is freaking out about ddos these days.

good luck!

Hey, thanks for the info. The site doesn't have any trouble with speed, or staying up, just a few Chinese links coming in every week or so. Last year at this time we were doing between 2000-6000 daily Uniques, nearly all US traffic. It converted amazingly well and the site made decent cash. Now it's between 1000-3000 daily Uniques, almost 100% Chinese, but I haven't really done any link-building **at all** (just new territory, and always heard it was best to get a natural profile), so our number of American links is very small now in comparison.
Do you think it is possible that I just need to build more relevant American links, and perhaps disavow the Chinese ones? (sorry if the question seems stupid, there is just so much different information out there and I am just starting to get my footing with the whole SEO/Linkbuilding thing).

Personally (and I'm not saying this is necessarily the right approach) I wouldn't bother to disavow anything, I'd just build better links, as my theory is that strong links will trump any low quality ones. So yeah, if the majority of your links are shitty Chinese ones, build some strong US or English language ones.

Ok, now this is where I am thrown off. Should I just go about building links the same way I would for any other site? It seems a little (ok, a lot) harder to get quality links in this industry. Is link exchange a good idea? Are comment links worth my time?

And thanks to all of you for giving me some advice. This forum kicks ass. :thumbsup

Hi there Alex. I sent you an email.

Got it, will reply a little later in the evening. I have to get off the PC and help plan for my youngest Daughters 5th Bday tomorrow. :) Salut!

its difficult to evaluate the issue without logs and stats. the answers are in there.

:thumbsup