The robot invasion has begun…just maybe not in the way that sci-fi movies would lead you to believe. If you track the traffic for your website, you might have noticed some spikes in referral traffic lately. That sounds like a good thing, right? I mean, you want more people visiting your site, so what’s the problem? The problem is when you take a closer look at your analytics and realize that the traffic you’re actually getting is from spam bots.
A spam bot, also known as a web robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. Bot visits can have the following negative effects:
- Bot visits distort the Google Analytics reporting, making it difficult to discern how well your site is performing from month to month.
- If the bot visits become so overwhelming that they cause your bounce rate to go up significantly, Google may interpret that to mean that people are not finding what they need on your website, and thus lower your website’s SEO ranking.
- Bot visits may be using up server space and cause your site to run slower.
How Can You Stop the Bots?
Blocking spam bots from accessing your site is the best solution, and there are several ways to do this. However, with new bots are being released daily, it’s impossible to block them all. At corecubed, we’re aware of this serious issue and we’re taking ongoing steps for all our SEO clients to lessen the number of bot visits that show up in their analytics.
To get a better understanding of how your site is performing, we recommend focusing on the numbers in the direct and organic visits of your Google Analytics report rather than focusing on the overall statistics shown at the beginning of this section of the report.
Need help fighting the bots? Contact corecubed to learn more about our SEO and web maintenance services and find out how we can help protect your analytics from the bot invasion!