Sudden Spike in Singapore Traffic – Possible Bot Activity or Scam?

[Aria_Art_House]

Hello, I’m hoping someone can help determine whether this is a known issue.

Since Friday, our Lumpiko store has been receiving an unusually high volume of visits from Singapore. We have never had customers or traffic from Singapore before, but in just a few days it has become our second-highest country by visits. These sessions are viewing a mix of very old and brand-new products, but no sales or meaningful engagement are occurring.

A few concerning details:
• The Singapore visits show up in the country ranking, but do not appear on the live map the way all other customer locations do.
• The traffic is steady, repetitive, and does not resemble normal browsing behavior.
• Nothing in our marketing or referral sources explains this sudden geographic shift.

We are trying to determine whether:

1. This could be bot or scraper activity,

2. Someone is using a Singapore IP or proxy, or

3. Other sellers have recently noticed similar patterns.

If anyone has experienced this or if an admin could advise whether this is a known issue and it's being handled, we would really appreciate the insight. Thank you.

[Sara_H]

@Aria_Art_House  there's nothing you can do about the traffic. Could be scraping images for ai training. They could be using a VPN and not be in Singapore at all.

I can't see Zazzle being able to do anything about it either.

Look on the bright side - items are getting viewed and not falling into the optimization trap

[Nisuris]

Hello,

I’ve had the same problem for at least a week now. Everything you described in your message is happening to me as well, exactly the same. I’ve been following the conversations here to see if other people are experiencing the same issue and if there’s anything that can be done to fix it.

[Fantabuloustef]

Many designers have noticed this problem for several weeks. Different messages have been posted on the forum about it. Search the forum in “all discussions” keyword “Singapore” and you will find them.

[Bepina]

same here, I don't get a lot of traffic in general so this sudden spike cannot be real people (and different individuals) from Singapore.

[Westerngirl2]

This is happening on my Benable lists, too. All of a sudden Singapore is really interested in stuff. Right.

[ColsCreations]

Google Analytics spike from China and Singapore is a Known Issue

 Why Your Google Analytics Is Suddenly Flooded with “Direct” Traffic from China

Why Your Website Is Receiving Traffic From Lanzhou & Singapore: Understanding AI Crawlers, Global In...

Google Analytics 4 Bot Traffic Increase from China / Singapore on WordPress Sites

Plenty more articles/reports about this if you Google the subject. The last link above is from Google's own support forum for Analytics and is often referenced in other articles I read. You can also find info on how to exclude these hits from your GA reports until Google itself is able to exclude it as it does other bot traffic. 

[Fantabuloustef]

Thank you for gathering all these articles ! It’s clearer now !

[NigelSutherland]

 I had a HUGE spike in "views on one of my blogs this week - over 7,000 hits in a day - from Hong Kong. I checked it out with ChatGPT and this is what it told me...

🧠 Common reasons for sudden traffic spikes

1. Bot or crawler activity
This is by far the most common cause. Automated bots — such as search engine crawlers, spam indexers, or even malicious scrapers — can suddenly visit thousands of your pages in a short period. Blogger’s built-in stats count every page request, even from non-human sources, so these inflate your numbers dramatically.

Typical signs:

• Traffic spikes overnight or at odd hours.

• Very short “average time on page” (seconds).

• No corresponding increase in comments or engagement.

• Traffic comes mainly from “referral” or “unknown” sources.

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2. Referrer spam
Sometimes, bots pretend to come from certain domains (like fake “referral” sites) to get you to click on their links. You can check your “Traffic sources” tab in Blogger — if you see strange URLs or spammy-looking domains, it’s almost certainly this.

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3. Real viral bump (less common)
If one of your posts has been shared on social media, Reddit, or featured somewhere, you might see a genuine increase. In that case, you’d also notice a spike in referrals from social sites or specific countries, and possibly reader comments or new followers.

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✅ What to do

• Don’t worry — it doesn’t harm your blog or ranking, and it usually settles back down in a few days.

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🕵️ What your stats suggest

• Hong Kong: 7,730 views — That’s an enormous and very specific concentration from one location, which is almost never genuine.

  • It’s common for data centres or proxy networks (often used by bots) to appear as “Hong Kong” in Blogger stats.

  • These bots often crawl through blogs en masse, scraping content or testing links.

• Timing — A sharp, sustained rise across two days (rather than a short viral peak) fits bot behaviour too.

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💡 What’s probably happening

A bot network or crawler — possibly one indexing content, testing ad networks, or scraping pages for SEO spam — has temporarily hit your blog. These events can come and go quickly, sometimes lasting a few days, and then vanish completely.

It’s not an attack and doesn’t damage your blog or ranking, but it distorts your traffic numbers badly.

[Marcia]

@ColsCreations thank you for those articles! They're quite interesting. My question is, however, are the high bounce rate from the bots affecting our Zazzle sales – that is, tweaking Zazzle's algorithms somehow so our store is presented as undesirable since there are plenty of views but no sales? Because my sales have been in the garbage for the past month, coinciding with when the bot activity started. 

Can we PLEASE get a moderator to weigh in on this? I've been repeatedly been asking this question & the response has been crickets.