Unusual spike in web traffic (the kintiskton problem)

I noticed a large spike in visits to the Lucid Design website over the last couple of days and have been trying to figure out the cause.

My first thought was to check keywords thinking it had something to do with the changes I’ve made recently to my SEO strategy. But, interestingly, I quickly discovered that the increased traffic all came via direct hits (i.e. not through a search engine or as a referral from another site).

I then thought perhaps it had to do with recent magazine advertising campaigns we have been running (and I was quietly pleased that they might actually be generating some interest).

But, on further investigation, I have discovered an unusally large number of “visitors” from a town in California called Montara (which I’ve never heard of and therefor became suspicious).

And, this is when it all becomes clear.

It seems there is a spider/robot/something automated hitting our website repeatedly at present from an organisation called kintiskton llc. A quick Google search brings up 966 pages (see http://www.google.com/search?q=kintiskton+llc). It appears this has been going on for at least four months and we’re just falling victim now.

I don’t know at this stage how widespread the problem is or how many of our sites it is affecting. I just wanted to give a heads-up to clients and others to check their server stats for traffic from “kintiskton” (in Google analytics, you can do this by viewing stats for Networks: https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/networks and you can filter it down if you wish).

I’m curious to hear how many other New Zealand websites have been affected by this.