Explained: What Is Bot Traffic?

If you have any experience of marketing, you will have heard of bot traffic. Traffic, for online businesses, means website visitors. While most of our marketing strategies reach out to human visitors, some might include getting bots to land, too.

A traffic bot is a piece of code. All artificial (non-human) bots are programmed bits of code that can be made to carry out simple, automated tasks. Most have been developed to save time, checking and searching for specific content.

All of your SEO is geared to ranking higher on search engine results pages. And how high you rank depends on bot traffic. Crawler bots developed by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Etsy etcetera) gather the data required to decide where your business URL appears on the results lists. These search engine bots are also referred to as spiders or spider bots. Each bot looks for a specific piece of data and reports back to the search engine that sends it.

Analytics bots like those used by SemRush look at your website to see where you are going right (and wrong) with your SEO. They measure your site’s performance.

Other types of traffic bots are used by the commercial sector to, for example, find data for the sender’s price comparison website, add your content to aggregator websites, and make sure your website isn’t using copyrighted material.

As soon as a bot arrives on your website, it becomes bot traffic. Unfortunately, not all bots are good. Some are programmed to insert malware or steal data. In the marketing world it is essential to use ‘good’ bots – traffic bots that carry out tasks that do not harm either the website or its users.

Examples of bad bots are web scrapers that take your content without permission and sell it to other websites, spam bots (you have probably read difficult to decipher comments on social media – this is usually the work of a bot), and bots that find parts of credit card details then go through all kinds of different numeric combinations until they hit the jackpot – your users’ full credit card information.

As around 40% of website traffic is estimated to be bot traffic and half of this is generated by ‘bad bots’, it is easy to understand why this type of visitor gets a bad name. However, not only do we need traffic bots to rise in the SERPs and tell us how well our websites are performing, we can also use them to improve the efficiency of our marketing strategies. In many cases, traffic bots are programmed to click on banners and other ads to generate revenue from pay-per-click websites. While improving SERP position through bot traffic is legal, click fraud is not. Newer technologies mean that it is increasingly difficult to detect bot clicks; advanced software gives its owner options that can make a bot seem distinctly human.

Thousands of bots can visit your website at any one time and, with slow-loading sites, can use up important bandwidth. This could impair the human user experience and backfire as an SEO strategy. When you expect or order lots of bots to arrive on your site, it’s important to ensure both your site and your server can handle this extra traffic. The last thing you want is for artificial traffic to slow things down for your human visitors.

The Diabolic Labs advanced traffic bot generator is primarily used as an SEO strategy. When you order bots that have been allocated unique residential IP addresses and set them to spend a certain amount of time on a page, traffic bots are undetectable and untraceable. As user experience and site popularity are important metrics for the search engine ranking algorithm, thousands of bots look like thousands of interested human visitors. Because of this, traffic bots have become yet another in a long list of SEO strategies that help companies get more human traffic than their competitors.