Watch Out for Bogus Traffic to Your Site(s)
Keeping track of you website traffic is very important for site health.
You don't want just any traffic to your site. You want traffic that is organic or has been targeted by you via email campaigns or adds. If your traffic is Bogus traffic or bots, Google can penalize your site.
Recently, for Black Friday, I did some adds, an email campaign and posted every day to multiple social media platforms. I check my traffic daily using Google Analytics. The day of my promotions, I noticed I had awesome traffic of around 800 a day on my MMO site for WA. That was great and it was mostly organic.
Unfortunately, I also saw similar traffic suddenly on my other niche site. It was all referral traffic and was obviously no coincidence. I decided to find out where this traffic was coming from.
I figured that if there was a link somewhere on my MMO site pointing to my other niche site, that may be the problem.
- First thing I did was do a search on my home page on my MMO site for that link and found nothing.
- Next I decided to go through all the comments on my MMO site to search for a link to my niche site.
- Yes, I went through every comment and found a direct link in a comment to my other niche site. Replaced that link with the correct link and suddenly the Bogus referral traffic stopped on my niche site.
The point of this story, you have to keep an eye on your traffic and don't assume a sudden spike is a good thing, because it usually isn't.
I hope this helps you for doing your traffic analysis using Google Analytics in the future. It sure helped me.
Recent Comments
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Good afternoon my friend, yes indeed I Check my traffic a couple times a day however, I didn't understand about the bogus traffic. Think you so much, may you have a blessed night.
I dont allow comments to post on my website without my approval first. I have one post that is getting bogus one or two word comments with links. They go right into the spam folder!!
Yes, me too. Unfortunately, this was probably one I modified and put in the wrong site link. Oops!
You are very critical to be able to detect bogus traffic during a campaign. I hope I will horn my skills to do the same.
Thank you for the tip.
Thank you Edgar. I am always trying to learn and this was a great time for that. I have been doing system integration and test for both hardware and software so this was right up my alley. My experience does come in handy.
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Thanks for the reminder and warning.
Glad to help Jimmy.