My site got several hits yesterday from obscure places like Montana and Indiana and Google Analytics shows a Bounce Rate = 100% for every “visitor”.
Had the locations been places like California I would assume it was a Google or Yahoo spider, but Montana?
Any idea what is really going on?
Did a bored rancher in Montana stumble across my website and leave in a second, or is there a more reasonable thing happening here? 
I like that !!
Spiders can be detected and are not added to your hit results. I have always wondered and would like to know how spiders can be detected.
Were the hits from a desktop, tablet or mobile?
12 desktop, 1 mobile. Average session duration 00:00:00
The hits are from smaller states and unheard of locations, like Baileyville, Kansas.
Maybe the Chinese have me in their sights?! 
If they were mobile they could be anybody travelling but desktops seems strange.
Maybe search for “Kansas http://yoursite.com” and see if there is any mention of your site.
Maybe the Chinese have me in their sights?!
Is there an abundance of Chinese in Baileyville, Kansas?
There aren’t many Chinese in Kansas! 
Maybe there is an evil chain of bots that have infected ranchers’ computers and the Chinese are plotting a DDOS attack on my site on New year’s Day? 
You will always get that with bounces because they can’t calculate the time spent on a page. I think it works out the time from the time of landing, to the time loading the next page. So if they only look at one page, you miss that data.
It is quite possible that the bouncers read the whole page and enjoyed the article, but also possible they thought it sucked and instantly hit “Back”, we cannot know when it’s a bounce.
I thought JavaScript was supposed to solve this issue because it could keep querying the page and not require hearing back from the server?
Do you think these are legitimate people or bots?
If these were real people, I’m confused how they found my site since it isn’t indexed very well yet and is low on content as it is new.
Check the source, there is a lot of referral spam about, which can distort the figures on a low-traffic site. They are usually referrals from spammy sites, often with “SEO” or similar in the title.
Bots may also show direct in the source. That’s not to say all direct traffic is bots, but you are unlikely to get much direct traffic on an unknown site.
If it is indexed at all, people can find it. They could be genuine visitors. If you don’t have much content yet, that would explain the bounce rate. They are all in the USA which I guess is your target region. A lot of spam referrals come from places like Brazil for example, but they can come from anywhere in the world.
If the site is WIP you may want to keep it from the index until it’s ready:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow, noarchive, noindex">
I normally add that to WIP pages, just remember to remove it when you are done.
Bad crawlers may ignore this, but it can help stop “real” people stumbling over your unfinished work.
I don’t know what kind of site you’re referring to, but here’s a good explanation about bounce rates:
Most people get this wrong (including this thread). Bounce rate simply indicates the number of people who leave your site from the landing page without interacting. They don’t do anything recordable, they don’t check out other pages, they just leave. But as far as I’ve read, there’s no real time factor there. They could read the entirety of the content available from the home page, or they could leave in a second, after seeing the page load.
So for example, if you have a one-page informational website for people with no CTA or other pages or gimmicks, your bounce rate for all visitors could be 100% and you’d have no reason to worry - it would just become a useless metric.
Back to the topic: Maybe those people simply arrived at your site and realized that they didn’t need/want it, or that it wasn’t the same place they’d thought, or wasn’t local enough, or any number of things? Or maybe they gleaned what they needed from that landing page?
The only logical reason can be that they did not find anything worth their while on the site.
but check the IP address of the visitor…check if they follow a pattern…
or can be a hacker…
Not the only logical reason at all.
How do I do this in Google Analytics?
Acquisition - All Traffic - Source/Medium
That will list all sources.
You can show Source as a Secondary Dimension in other views, Eg, in Location, click:
Secondary Dimension - Acquisition - Source
That will show the sources from the different locations.
Under Acquisition → All Traffic → Source/Medium
You can then take a look and see that some of the referral sources (or in some cases, nearly all of them) are dubious in nature. Using your own judgement, of course.
Some good examples for referral spam in there.
Yeah… unfortunately.
lol
I like to filter them. Though it does not stop them visiting and using your bandwidth, it clears up the Analytics view.
It can be tiresome adding lots of filters, but you can use regex so it filters anything with “best-seo” or “for-your-website” etc…
Dumb question, but what is the best way to really learn how to use Google Analytics. I have never really been impressed with it, and that is probably due to my ignorance.
I want to really learn more about SEO and analytics, but only have so much time, so anyway to speed up my learning would be great.
There is a Google Analytics Certification:
It suggests these 2 courses to prepare:
