Bot Traffic: What it is and Why it Hurts

Fake website traffic from bots is a concern for webmasters. It can send their bounce rate skyrocketing or cause them to concentrate their SEO efforts on referral sources which are not sending real traffic.

How Do I Know if My Traffic is from Bots?

Huge increases in traffic are a warning sign that the traffic isn't real. You can usually tell it's a bot because it only stays for a second and originates from a foreign country where the language is different that your website's language. People can have bots mimic real traffic so have to examine your analytics carefully. A bot can mimic a visit from a search engine or it could appear as a social media referral.

Why Do Bots Crawl Websites?

There are good bots. such as the Googlebot which indexes web pages, and bad, or spam, bots. Spam bots can look for blogs that accept comments so they can submit generic spam comments with a link. Sometimes the link is to their own website and sometimes it is a phishing link. Bots can also harvest email addresses, spread malicious malware and scrape websites for content. Your content could show up all over the Internet and you could have competitors outranking you with articles you wrote.

How Could Webmasters Benefit from Fake Traffic?

Webmasters can have bots crawl their websites to show more traffic than they actually have; either to sell the site for more money than it is worth or to increase the money they can charge for ads. Unethical SEO firms may have bots pretending to be from a google search visit the client’s website so they can artificially increase the organic traffic. They can buy thousands of visitors for $5, but it’s likely they are buying bot traffic from a click farm and no real humans will visit the website. Traffic without conversions is pointless. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/bklirq/iamgettingalargeamountoftrafficbutitis/.