This article explains about the experience of the author regarding fake traffic and how fake traffic can affect your website or blog. In short, an insight of fake traffic and its side effects. Fake traffic in Blogspot.
Web traffic is the elixir of any website. A website without traffic is as bad as a pond without water. The website will be of no use if you are especially running a business. Even for blogs, it is important to have good web traffic.
Two Types of Traffic
There are two types of traffic on the internet, do you know? Yes, good traffic and bad traffic. Good traffics are those coming from search engines(organic), referrals and loyal visitors. Today, we will be focusing on the bad traffic or the fake traffic.
What is fake traffic?
Fake traffic is an automatic software generated impressions on a website. The traffic is a pure simulation by software, tool or a bot which doesn't have any human visitors involvement on your website. The traffic changes very quickly by shifting IP address. The IP address once will be from India and the next IP address can be from some other country. These traffics are fake because, you are posing fake to advertisers and audience that you are generating so much traffic, but not.
Why Fake Traffic?
Have you ever generated fake traffic to your website before? Don't ever try it. Fake traffic will not give you ANYTHING. You may earn for time being, but will lose everything tomorrow.
If you din't generate any fake traffic, then someone else can generate fake traffic to your website. Anyone owning a website at some point might receive fake traffic.
Coming to the question on "why fake traffic to your website?", when this traffic was not generated by you, then why would someone invest to send fake traffic to your website?
There are some reasons why someone should consider sending traffic to your website. The only big reason why someone would send fake traffic is they are your "Competitors" in the business or they have an enmity with you.
Why will happen someone send fake traffic?
1) To shut down your Adsense account (Google Adsense don't like people getting the evil traffic)
2) To Shut down your web servers by consuming too much resources
3) To shut down your other ad agents.
4) To cramp your website bandwidth quota.
5) To fool your normal traffic statistics.
6) To lower your business relationships with your customers and clients.
7) To fool the blog's ranking systems
Have you ever noticed fake traffic in your Blogspot blog?
Some days ago during the second week of Aug 2012, I had noticed that there was a sudden raise in traffic to my website. I came to know this, because I check my blog at least 6 to 10 times in a day. I check the Google Analytics and Blogger dashboard statistics. I constantly monitor the web traffic to my website daily. Good that, I noticed them.
Here is a snapshot of my findings:
These traffics were coming from an unknown region from Africa. The IP addresses were shifting within the same region and sometimes from USA. I noticed this in my Google Analytics.
Tools you can use to detect fake traffic:
1) Google Analytics
2) Statscounter
3) Sitemeter
4) Awstats
5) Any other tool you like which is good to detect the live traffic. Please suggest some for our readers.
I recommend you to use Google Analytics and Statscounter.
What did I do when I noticed fake traffic?
I came to know that something is wrong and the first thing I did was alerted the Google Adsense team about this. I thought for a Blogger powered website with Adsense on it, the first thing would be to alert Adsense team. I did exactly that.
Here is the form I used to alert Adsense team :
https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/request.py?hl=en-GB&contact_type=invalid_clicks_contact&rd=2Suggestions:
1) For Blogger users: Inform to Blogger support team if the fake traffic doesn't stop. YourBlogger site may be suspended due to this.
2) For other users: Inform to your hosting company.
3) If you have hosted your domain via GoDaddy or any other domain hosting company for your Blogger blog, then inform them as well.
Alert the above, only if the fake traffic doesn't stop the next day. Keep an eye and stay close to the traffic statistics.
Hope this article would help all others facing similar kind of problem with their websites or blogspots.
