Unexplained Spikes in Web Traffic

If you’ve seen a uptick in visitors to your site over the past month, it may not be real eyes viewing your site but rather a bandwidth hog in the form of an AVG malware scanner.

Slashdot had an interesting note today regarding a 6% rise in their traffic that they attributed to the antivirus vendor AVG:

“AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we’re seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots.”

Why the AVG Uptick?
The AVG malware scanner is called LinkScanner. The Register has detailed the possible cause behind the deceptive traffic in several posts:

“In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each address that turns up on Google’s results page. According to the company, more than 20 million people have downloaded the new AVG 8, and this has caused a huge up-tick in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register.”

Could It Impact Me?
While the program may be good from a security perspective of preventing people from visiting malicious sites, it has resulted in increased costs for the website owners paying for the extra bandwidth.

“Adam Beale, who runs a UK-based internet consultancy, says that across his small stable of clients, traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites. And this is more than just an inconvenience. After all, sites live and die by their traffic numbers. And net resources aren’t free.”

“Although [the AVG LinkScanner] might be good for the security of users, it’s a real pain for website owners and webmasters,” Beale tells us, having blogged about this growing problem. “It’s causing people to think their traffic is increasing, costing those who pay for bandwidth, and wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files.”

Resolving the Problem
In writing this post, I’m not trying to sound the alarm, but explaining why visitors or bandwidth demand to a site are increasing is a significant challenge for people like me to figure out. It causes me to question trends that indicate increased blog readership…or in the case of a company seeing increased traffic without an increase in revenues, this can be more problematic.

To really determine whether the added AVG traffic is really the cause of an surprise uptick in web traffic, I would turn to the following articles:

How to beat AVG’s fake traffic spew – The Register
AVG throttles web analytics – Tech Blorge

Please let me know if this is something that has impacted you.

Tags: AVG, bandwidth, bandwidth hog, network, web traffic spike