In order for your site to be at the top of search engines, it must meet the requirements of search engines and be attractive to visitors. The more users are interested in your site and spend a lot of time on it, the higher your site will be in the rankings.

We all know that cheating with fake visitors is popular now. At first glance, this seems like an easy and quick way to raise a site, but is it really so?

Search engine algorithms take into account behavioral factors and in addition to access to the resource, also take into account the actions on the site, clicks on it, and the time spent on the pages. The bots can’t replicate exactly. Thus, instead of the popularity and development of the site, you can get sanctions from search engines for cheating.

Consequences of cheating with bot traffic

Now search engine algorithms have learned to detect suspicious traffic and ignore it when relevant.

The danger of bots is that traffic manipulation can use unscrupulous SEO to artificially increase their performance. However, when traffic is received, the number of orders and conversions remains the same, and the budget will be wasted.

Such cheats are difficult to recognize in analytics for a simple site owner.

Several points that may arouse suspicion

• Increased traffic from irrelevant regions as a result of using a proxy server for cheating;
• The significant difference in the number of conversions on certain phrases in general statistics and on Wordstat;
• All abrupt changes: in the ratio of measures to devices; growth of organic traffic from a particular channel and search engine; increased number of failures;
• Queries to the site will often come from outdated versions of the browser, as well as unpopular browsers (such as Internet Explorer), again, their number will be abnormal;
• High frequency of requests from non-reputable subnets.

Not always sharp increases in indicators mean that this is bot traffic, sometimes there may be more harmless reasons for this. However, if as a result of a complete analysis you notice several manifestations, it is most likely him.

Another annoying point that site owners may face – is if the site is connected to pay-per-click advertising, you can get banned and be left without payments for cheating clicks and bots.

With a large number of malicious bots, owners will spend a large budget on advertising without the expected effectiveness.

Requests by bots to the site create a load that can affect the download speed and performance of the resource as a whole. Again, as a result of the deterioration of the site and the speed of response to user requests, the resource will be reduced in issuance.

Conclusion 

What to look for to detect harmful bot traffic:

• We check the “Bounce” report and pay attention to the correlation of the source of conversions;
• In the Metric we check on what inquiries visits with a high refusal rate took place;
• Assessment of traffic efficiency;
• The ratio of information on transitions (device, region, IP address).

What are the consequences of cheating?

• Click-fraud of paid advertising;
• Resource load, slow down, or complete denial of service;
• Decrease in positions;
• Distorted statistics, increased failure rate;
• Reduction of conversion;
• Junk spam, registrations, fake orders, parsing;
• Increasing the duration of data processing.

Unfortunately, traffic bots are popular and difficult to identify. As you can see, these bots are not useful, and the consequences for sites can be serious and expensive.

These effects do not always occur as a result of bot traffic, sometimes it can be system errors, technical problems, so it is important to be able to analyze statistical data.