Traffic bots can mess up your analytics

I noticed an odd trend on a couple of websites. At the end of January, many websites worldwide have been hit with a spambot.

This spambot spiked the daily traffic from the traffic the website normally gets to a huge spike in traffic. A very noticeable spike. An obvious spike. On most sites I checked, the spike was about 1000 – 5000 or more fake visits.

Enough to look very suspicious.

But what’s the point to send fake traffic to another website?

What would the spammers get out of this?

Let’s try to unpack this…

The spammer made it look like the traffic going to a page in your site that doesn’t exist. Something like /trafficbot.live definitely not a page on the site. Initially, it looked like the website was hacked and caused some panic.

However, that was not the case. One theory could be that the traffic generated on your site caused some sort of backlink to another site. This is a form of referral spam and its main goal is to get traffic somehow.

Another thought is that this is a form of ghost spam and the hope is that you would visit the referring link, sending traffic to their website.

Does this damage my site?

Probably not. This is likely a form of ghostspam and the goal is to drive traffic to their site. The damage was probably already done in the data of your analytics.

Now what?

You would want to repair your analytics by excluding traffic from that source by creating a filter. The bad news about this is that it won’t repair traffic that already been to your site. But it can filter it out moving forward.

Once you have a filter create a segment to weed out the past traffic to your site from those sources.

That is a pain in the neck. It’s unfortunate that companies out there use spamming techniques to show or create traffic to your site.

If you think your website was hit by trafficbot.live contact us contact us and we can help create these filters and segments in your Google Analytics.

Written by Avery Nubson
Avery can be reached at avery@nufiremarketing.com