The Importance of Organic Traffic
In today’s super-connected digital world, everyone wants to show up at the top of Google. Being at the top of Google means that your website gets more “natural” or organic traffic. This increased organic traffic usually means an increase in sales, growing your bottom line.
Part of the way the internet works are “online bots.”
Let’s dig in!
What are Bots?
Simply put, online bots are just software that automatic tasks across the internet. Bots help with making websites visible on the web, help with creating online authority, and follow specific patterns to “make sense of the internet.”
In the bot world, there are Good SEO bots and Bad Bots.
Good Bots
Most Good bots are search engine bots. These are bots that go to specific pages on websites. From there, they pass informational details about each URL that’s important to the search engine. Good bots help “index” or “crawl” the internet, rank websites, and help us find websites.
Bad Bots
Bad bots are programs and software that’s been designed by hackers or competitors to hurt your site. Bad bots usually steal your website’s unique content, drop viruses on your site, and do other activities to hurt your business.
The worse thing is that bad hurts usually hurt your rankings in Google, called SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Showing up lower in Google means less visibility which in turn hurts your business’s income.
How Bad Hurts Your Website Ranking
Here’s just a few ways that bad bots can hurt your website’s SEO rankings.
1. Skewed Analytics: Website analytics tools such as Google Analytics make sense of the web by looking at traffic patterns. Now that over 60% of the web traffic is generated by these bots, your Google Analytics can be way off because they don’t differentiate between bot and human traffic. This “muddy data” can impact your marketing, sales, IT, and management. This can lead to making bad decisions. Not good.
2. Web Scraping: Another form of bad bots are scraper bots. These bots are specifically programmed to steal content from your website and then put that content on other websites. Duplicating your content somewhere else can be bad because search engines will connect your website with a poorly ranking website. Some search engines will drop your SERP ranking because they see all of your content all over the web. This results in less visitors and lower revenue.
3. Automated Attacks: Another type of bad bots do repetitive attacks on your website. These bots are good are mimicing human behavior so that they can’t be detected. In the worse case scenarios, they can take over accounts, do creditial stuffing, lower inventory, buy products, create accounts, and more.
4. Price scraping: Price scaper bots steal real-time pricing data from a website. Competitors uses these types of bots to know the price points of your products in real-time. By using price scaper bots, competitors can stay a step ahead in the pricing game, which means that lower price products will show above yours. This results in less customer visits and overall conversions.
Form Spamming: Form spam bots are the worst! Form spamming is when a bot does repeated submission of forms on a website to spam the website with fake leads. If left unchecked, this will create thousands of low-quality backlinks. In the worst case scenario, search engines can determine that your site is a “spammy site” and completely remove it from showing up in search engines. Such as catestrophic move would destroy a business.
What Should You Do?
First, it’s super important that someone in your company or marketing team spend time looking at your Google Analytics. That person should be aware of where website traffic is coming from, at all times.
If you notice a sudden spike in Organic traffic, immediately investigate the source. If you determine that it’s a bot, contact your web hosting provider and have them put a block on your website.
This should solve the problem.
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