I hired someone to handle SEO for my website, and they’ve been working on it for about a week. For the past 4 days, I’ve been getting around 3000 daily visits, but here’s the weird part—Google Analytics shows the session time as 0 seconds for all the traffic. Strangely, 60% of the visitors are adding products to their cart, but no sales are happening. Also, Google Search Console shows only about 20 clicks a day, not 3000.
I asked the SEO person, and they said this traffic comes from Google and won’t harm the site. But I’m pretty sure it’s bot traffic, and I’m concerned about the impact on SEO long term.
Does anyone have advice? Will this hurt my site? Should I stop this bot traffic immediately?
It’s going to mess up your reporting and offers no real benefit. Honestly, there’s no upside to this. What’s his reason for sending this type of traffic?
Cormac said:
It’s going to mess up your reporting and offers no real benefit. Honestly, there’s no upside to this. What’s his reason for sending this type of traffic?
He claims that it boosts SEO rankings when traffic comes in like this.
@Nathan
I’ve experimented with click-through rate (CTR) manipulation using real traffic like Serpclix, and while that can sometimes work, bot traffic is a hard no. Anyone with real SEO experience will tell you it’s a terrible idea.
Bot or automated traffic is one of the oldest and often overlooked blackhat techniques. It may work for a while, but once you’re caught, it all falls apart.
For more details, search for “Spam policies for Google web search.”