Traffic Bots – What are they and are they malicious or helpful?

Traffic bots – aka bots – are software applications designed to send “hits” and “actions” to a website.  They create the illusion that people are visiting the site and even clicking on links within the site.

But none of the “traffic” from this kind of manipulation is real.  This is strictly mindless, virtual robots creating false statistics.

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Why Use Bots?

Why would anyone use traffic bots?

Well, they quickly make it appear like your website is getting a lot of traffic, and all at no cost to you, other than whatever the software initially cost.  You can even download some website traffic bots completely free (except free is never free…).

When you set up and start using a bot, you will see an almost instant and massive increase in your website traffic.  It can be very impressive.

A lot of traffic bots also make it possible to set them up so that the website traffic only comes from specific countries.  You can even ad in search terms, search engines, particular sites, and so on, for the traffic to come from.  Sounds pretty good, right?

Why Not Use Traffic Bots?

Why not use traffic bots for website traffic?

The answer should be really simple.  The traffic is not real.  It won’t bring any sales.  The clicks aren’t human clicks.  Much worse, if you are running any kind of affiliate program where you’re paid for views or clicks (PPC), such as Adsense or Infolinks, you will get banned.  This is always the risk with any kind of black hat SEO.

Advertisers that pay for views and clicks understandably draw a lot of interest from people who want to cheat them.  They don’t pay very much for each click or view, but if a person could get enough traffic, they could potentially make a fair amount of money.

For that reason, a lot of effort has been put into trying to beat the system, to generate useless traffic that does nothing but fool the advertisers.  But advertisers who pay for views and clicks are not stupid.  They use this kind of advertising because it works so well for them, but it only works if the traffic is real.  So what they’ve done is to create Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots that do nothing but look for patterns that indicate cheating is going on.

Usually, it doesn’t take an AI bot long to detect website traffic bots.  Then the jig is up and the would be cheater is banned.

Buying traffic on a budget then become a potentially very risky option.

How do I know?

Okay, this is a real concern for the little guy.  How do I know that the cheap traffic I’m buying isn’t bot traffic?  It’s advertised as being genuine human traffic.  It’s being sold on a very reputable site.  It must be real, as advertised, right?

Not necessarily.  In fact, as more and more advertisers go to sites like Fiverr to sell their wares, the temptation to sell bot traffic as real is greater than ever.  Basically, if the price is too good to be true, it likely is a website traffic bot.

If you want to find out if the traffic from any site is real, human traffic, do some research.  Check the search engines to see if anyone has anything good to say about the traffic source.  See if there are any complaints.  Contact the seller to ask about where the traffic is coming from.  You would be surprised how often a person selling “real, human traffic” will admit that it’s a website traffic bot when you ask.

Conclusion

In the end, buying traffic carries with it a real risk of buying bot traffic.  This fact has come to this writer from experience.  You can buy real, human traffic.  You can also, just as easily, buy website bot traffic that has been advertised as real, human traffic.

If you decide to buy traffic, do your best to make sure it’s real.  After all, you won’t make any money from fake traffic.

But if you do buy traffic, think twice about placing links on your site from advertisers that pay for views or clicks.  You might want to at least deactivate them while you’re running a paid traffic campaign.  Even better, spend a little money and do a test buy.  Send that traffic to a page that has no such links on it, and analyze that traffic after a month.  This is a much safer way to start out, if you are going to buy traffic.

There is a better way to get high quality traffic without breaking the bank.  Subscribe to our list to receive notice when that article comes out!