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Have you seen a strange boost in direct traffic since December 19, 2012? Has it been steadily growing over the last few months? You might think that it’s your marketing efforts paying off; maybe your branding has finally found fertile ground! Unfortunately that’s not the case.I first discovered the fake traffic several of weeks ago when trying to parse out some of the blocked Safari traffic (more on that in a later post). While trying to figure out more accurate traffic information for Safari, I noticed that for some sites Firefox was reporting unusually high direct traffic.My curiosity was piqued I looked into the traffic and saw my average time on site decreasing, and my bounce rate increasing. I started digging into the data and found that all the traffic was coming from Firefox 3.5. The traffic from this browser appeared overnight on December 19th, 2012 and has a visit duration of 0 seconds along with a bounce rate nearing 100%. I took a look at some other sites and saw the same traffic pattern emerging on almost every single site.

I was quite stumped at this point, why was I getting a large spike of traffic from an old version of Firefox? After talking with some of the members on my team we thought that it might be a bot emulating Firefox that Google Analytics is somehow tracking as a person.Working off this premise I checked the network domain that the traffic was coming from, and all of it was coming from Yahoo.com. So it appears that since December Yahoo has been using a new bot that reports all its crawling as a direct visit. I don’t know why this crawler is being reported as traffic, but it has altered my data quite a bit over the last few months. Thankfully it is easy to take care of using advanced segments.