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Can Fake Traffic Damage Search Rankings? What About Business Reputation?

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Fake Traffic Blaster

You see, we -as bloggers, internet marketers, and online business owners- work real hard to keep our content rank on the web, and one of the most annoying things is to lose your site ranking for any reason, whither it was by mistake or something naturally happen (for example: Google algorithm changes), it even can get worse when someone attack your site by a fake traffic hit.

I won’t go through more details on what is fake traffic and how it can hurt your blog, you can see my past post in this topic to get the whole idea:

Read the Fake traffic post.

I will show you some interesting stats from the past year so you can see what I’ve dealt with, and let your imagination tells you where I would be if I allow fake traffic on my website, and what I did to eliminate fake traffic.

So, keep reading!

Can Fake Traffic Damage Search Rankings?

The answer -to be honest- is: I don’t know!

I won’t wait till I lose my site ranking, I won’t experiment fake traffic on my site. I won’t gamble on my site ranking to proof anything to you, really. But, I would pay more attention to my blog stats (you should do too), and I will try to protect my blog, thus prevent the problem before it happen.

Trust on this, what you are looking for here is your business reputation, not your search rankings, so let’s stick with the more important things first, then deal with the rest.

What About Business Reputation?

I care about my business reputation, I can’t afford losing it for any reason.

That’s why I got in touch with the folks at BuySellAds when I knew they’ve enabled CPM ads model on FamousBloggers.net the other day, I had to explain the jump in traffic (which was fake) and explained to them why I won’t be selling ads based on that traffic.

I did that to protect my business reputation.

I mean, who would like to buy an ad on my website if they won’t get any clicks or real impressions? it’s not good to sell ads based on fake traffic and expose myself to have issues and lose trust of my advertisers.

One year of dealing with Fake Traffic

Here is some fake traffic stats that should be interesting.

Let’s start first with Google Analytics stats starting from 1 Jan 2012 till today 25 Nov. 2012, almost 11 months.

We are looking here at: 1,5000,000+ Fake Hits

Google Analytics Fake Traffic Stats

Note: Click on the image to enlarge in a new browser window.

This data showing fake web traffic that has been taking off FamousBloggers, we’ve directed this IE traffic to a page outside of the bog (it’s even hosted on another web server) so we can measure it.

Also, here is some other break down charts for year and months via the whos.amung.us site that I’ve used to collect fake page views and visits, I’ve used that service because it provide real time data and present it in several different ways and graphs.

Year of Fake Traffic Stats

fake traffic stats - one year

As you can see in the graph above, the average fake hits was 27 hits at the same time, and the max was 348 fake hits on site at the same time.

One Month of Fake Traffic Stats

Now, that’s a 30 days slice of the graph showing the latest fake traffic hits in November till the day 25th:

fake traffic stats 30 days

This really hurts!

Protect Your WordPress Site from Fake Traffic

Now, let’s talk about protection!

After many hours of testing during the past 11 months, we put together a special algorithm to deal with such fake traffic in a form of a premium WordPress plugin, we call it the FTBlaster (Fake Traffic Blaster). And thanks to this plugin, we could protect FamousBloggers from this continues hit, fake traffic is no longer an issue!

We also did a graph to display Real-Time Fake Traffic Statistics from our network of blogs (blogs that runs our plugin), so we can grab some useful information to share it with the world.

Real-Time Fake Traffic Statistics

Click To View Real-Time Fake Traffic Stats

Start protecting your blog today

Now, that you see how this is harmful, you can start protecting your blog today by running the FTBlaster Premium plugin and configure it for max protection against fake traffic.

Take advantage of FTBlaster limited time discount and protect your websites now!

About

I create websites with WordPress, and I develop Schema Plugins to help SEOs. I am a social network lover. I am also the night creature who works hard to keep this project up. Owner and founder of the Famous Blog.

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{ 19 Responses }

  1. Charles Rodrigues says:
    I am not someone who encourage Fake Traffic. It may give you some profit in a short run but can be a disaster in the long run.
  2. charansingh says:
    I regularly see people advertising bot traffic packages that send 1,000s of visitors to your site to inflate it's "visitors". I understand why people think this may be a good idea - e.g. some people vainly think it helps Alexa rankings - as well as the more nefarious reasons - e.g. "pump-and-dump" when selling website. But I'd love thoughts on whether fake traffic such as this being sent to your website can impact on search rankings - i.e. is the Google also smart enough to know your traffic is fake, and if you get lots of it (and here I guess Google would presume it's you that bought it) penalize you for it?
  3. Dean Saliba says:
    I would say that it only damages you if you are hoping to make money with it via ad networks. I haven't done fake traffic but I did BUY traffic recently and I made about $0.02 from it.
  4. Tom says:
    Anything fake cannot stay for long, it has to end one day. Similarly, fake traffic will not benefit for long or might not benefit at all. In addition, it would deteriorate the online reputation of the blog or business. The site ranking will go down and this will lead to a lot of loss.
    • Dominique Jackson says:
      I 100% agree with what Tom said. Black Hat techniques have a history of only providing temporary success and eventually lead you downhill. Just look at the damage that was done to all of the YouTube accounts that had fake views. It's all about quality!
  5. Mohamed Osam says:
    Yes Hesham, unfortunately people do not realize how serious this matter is till it is too late. I had many approaching me asking for help after the fact and after their AdSense account been suspended. The main problem here is that once your AdSense account (or any other as network account for that matter) is suspended, it becomes very hard to get it back, one of my friends been trying to get it back for the last 6 weeks to no avail. The problem is that, Google doesn't care on whether that fake traffic was generated by you, your competition or a malformed app. To Google, this type of traffic is hurting their advertisers network, therefore assumes the worst and considers the traffic as a fraudulent activity and suspends the account accordingly. Once the account is suspended, you will have to build your case to convince Google that it was something completely out of your hand. In any case, Google won't reactivate your account unless you take care of the problem first.
  6. Hamza Sheikh says:
    hmm sounds great. It's a very common attack / issue among the business websites. Most of the time , some jealous rivals send lots of fake traffic to their competitor's to hurt their presence in the search engine, and as well as in the market.
  7. Jacko says:
    Very interesting something to consider. Item# 2,012,131 on the list of things to do lol. Man, the task list of a blogger just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. Now we have to worry about fake traffic, fake backlinks, fake fb likes; as charlie brown would say, "good grief."
  8. Anubhab says:
    You have taken up a great topic in here. I have seen many people using fake traffic such as from junk sites or surf to earn sites and sites maligned with hidden iframes. They mostly use it for the purpose of reducing alexa rank rapidly or while they are very much interested in selling the website. It's very important for one to keep a look out for such fake deals.
  9. vicky says:
    I didn't know that there was such thing as fake traffic and I opened this article out of real curiosity as to what its talking about. It was worth read and I will assure you that I will install this plugin soon as it really hurt to see what you displayed in graph. Thanks so much for sharing.
  10. Sneha says:
    Hey Zebida, Nice article...!!! Before I had never paid any heed on the fake traffic. Your post is alarming everyone that we should at least check the that is our website is also suffering from fake traffic.. Thanks.
  11. Aasma says:
    Seriously never heard that any website can get fake traffic as well. Though irrelevant traffic certainly not good as they won't be interested what you're sharing and telling. So it's better to focus on getting relevant traffic.
  12. Ram (Gyantastic!) says:
    Wow! great case study. I think fake traffic do affects a site in a bad way. But if you have the authority and regularly provide HQ content it will not affect much.
  13. Zouras says:
    Hello Hesham Zebida! I really like your post and believe me that your infographics are really a huge value for people! I think that fake traffic can hurt any website but I also believe that sophisticated search engines like Google have solved this problem or they will solve it in the near future. My personal opinion is that in order to solve this problem, experts must improve the artificial intelligence of search engines by making changes in their algorithms...and Voilà!! :-) Thank you, Zouras