Blocking IP Address from Ashburn VA which is a AWS site

Site URL: https://theyvonne.com

Hi Everyone,

Thank you so much for any assistance you can provide.

I believe I have a bot visiting my site.  The IP is always from Ashburn Virginia and an IP lookup indicates the IP is an AWS site.  One IP did indicate it was from a site in China.

It use to be just once a month. Now. it 3 times a month and because I have low traffic these visits indicate my peak volume. I can get up to 40+ at a time.  

It is not a big deal but I want to start promoting, some of my work, and these visits will mess. up the analytics.

Question:  How do I block or remove them from my counts.   Every instance is a different IP address but typically each instance is the same for 20-40. views.  I am seeing that the view/visit number is getting higher each month.    The view always starts on my privacy policy page.

ps... I accidentally posted before finishing writing and then did an edit that got interrupted by a phone call. If this caused any issue please forgive me.

All my best and many thanks

Yvonne

Firstly, let me say that I understand. These types of "visits" can really mess up a site's built-in (Squarespace) Analytics. Also, they can often form a large part of your Analytics totals which can be difficult for small businesses. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to block particular visitors from reaching your site. A Squarespace website is either public or it isn't; you cannot filter visits by IP address, geography or anything else.

Note that, if you are technically minded, you could use a third party reverse proxy service (like Cloudflare) to block IP traffic to your primary domain, but it is technically complex and will require you to understand DNS.  However, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to block the traffic that reaches your website via the built-in Squarespace domain (the one that ends with .squarespace.com). That will require changes by Squarespace's own engineers.

Secondly, it isn't possible to say why these visits are taking place, or who is ultimately behind them. There is a large Amazon data centre in Ashburn so visits from this location are likely to be from servers hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but absolutely anyone can buy their services and then visit your website using them. For example, these could be legitimate visits by users who subscribe to a VPN service.

Squarespace employees do not routinely respond to forum posts (see item 6 of the forum guidelines) so, if you'd like to see improvements to either block or filter web traffic, I recommend that you raise a feature request by contacting Squarespace Customer Care.

@paul2009 Thank you for you answer.  That what I thought,  I just wasn't sure if there was something similar to robot.txt. 

not an answer but I'm seeing the same thing from Ashburn and that's what brought me here.

It would be nice to be able to block the traffic.

If anyone knows what they're doing I'd be interested.  They regularly request the site's privacy policy and terms of service, which is kind of odd.

Site URL: http://www.juliemandel.com/

I got an email from Squarespace Analytics today reporting 32 'unique visitors' to a site I created. As it turns out they are:

1. All located in Ashburn VA
2. All are from Windows PCs
3. Are from three different browsers
4. Were all at 9am.

It is unlikely that this was a human that was casually browsing. It seems possible that this is part of a scam of some sort or someone gathering data to make a sales call to propose charging to improve search terms or something. 

Should I worry? Should I do anything?

33 minutes ago, jdachs said:

Should I worry?

No.

Quote

Should I do anything?

No.

Well except if someone tries to scam you don't fall for the scam.

I get junk email pretty regularly about SEO help and their not worth the bits they wasted. Put 'em in the trash  and empty.

32 hits is a very small number. If it were thousands or more I might to begin to wonder. Tens of thousands begin to worry and perhaps alert SS to some kind of issue.

With 32 hits all coming from one location in a short period of time this could be just some kind of crawler or crawlers. Perhaps all working together to handle a particular piece of whatever data they are trying to assemble. The different browsers isn't necessarily nefarious. This could just be testing if your pages are returning different result for different browsers. With only 32 hits there really isn't enough data to make any kind of guess as to what is going on.

It appears that Ashburn VA is a big data center for many companies.

cc @RedRider

Thank you very much!

I have the same Ashurn, VA. issue.  Odd.

Whenever I see a wave of these Ashburn VA bot hits t's just a matter of a few days that I get any/all of the following spam scam:

* Broken link scam notification

* Accusation of use of stolen photos on the site.

* Consultant offering services, this being the most common.

They seem capable of pulling the email address that may be affiliated with the site, in my case most commonly from the contact pages.

Hello, I have got the same but it is 105 visit from Ashburn, not sure if I should start to worry about spamers 😅

Think it is a pretty high number.. 

On 7/14/2022 at 11:33 AM, Atencio_Studio said:

I have the same Ashurn, VA. issue.  Odd.

Same!!

You use to be able to block ip addresses in SS 5 version. Now you can’t with 7. Maybe if we keep bumping this thread someone will hear us!

11 hours ago, SJDeeds said:

Maybe if we keep bumping this thread someone will hear us!

Please see item six on the forum guidelines.

I get these as well on a regular basis and a lot of spam emails saying I have all these problems with my website and they want to help.... that's one thing. But I notice that the Ashburn bot will visit my site right after another (I suspect) legitimate visitor and go to that same page. Can we not block this Ashburn Bot visitor?

50 minutes ago, fernsfeathers said:

Can we not block this Ashburn Bot visitor?

SS does not provide a way to block IP addresses.

Bumping this because I also have this problem and it is destroying the usefulness of analytics. @Squarespace Guru like come on guys.

16 hours ago, christinemayb said:

Bumping this because I also have this problem and it is destroying the usefulness of analytics.

Squarespace employees do not routinely respond to forum posts (see item 6 of the forum guidelines) so, if you'd like to see improvements to either block or filter web traffic, I recommend that you raise a feature request by contacting Squarespace Customer Care.

I'm glad I found this thread. I was getting concerned about what was going on. I have the same visits from Ashburn. 

Just hopping in here to say the same!

@paul2009thanks for the info. I have this issue also. I feel a little more reassured now. Boring as it is. thanks agin for the info

Same! And my website is only for visual art. Very strange

Bumping. Having the same issue. There should be a fix for this. Analytics are not helpful if being manipulated.