Free Bot Traffic: Good or Bad for your Website?

Do you want to increase the traffic on your website? Beware! Don’t fall into the free bot traffic trap.

Many people use free bot traffic to increase the number of views and visitors to their websites.

But like everything, all free thing comes with a price.

Bot traffic is not always good for your website.

In this post, we are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of free bot traffic.

But before we move on with the topic, let’s learn about bot traffic first.

What is Bot Traffic:

As the name goes, bot traffic is not real traffic. It is non-human traffic created artificially by bots (robots).

It is a software application that runs on its own and performs various tasks online.

These bots are programmed to do certain tasks online. More than half the traffic online is created by bots and not humans.

Because of this behaviour, many people use bots for unethical practices.

Bot traffic, also known as fake traffic, is the use of web bots to collect information on websites.

A bot can be a spider that collects information from different websites or an automated program that sends information over the Internet.

Bot traffic is divided into 2 types.

Good Bots:

Many people consider bot traffic malicious but not all bots are bad.

There are some good bots that are used for a genuine purpose. Here are the types of good bots.

• Search Engine Bots: These bots help you to get listed on various search engines by checking the web.
• Monitoring Bots: These bots monitor various websites to check for malicious activities and healthy sites.
• SEO Crawlers(like Semrush): These bots are used by search engines to rank the website in the search result.
• Copyright Bots: These bots ensure that no one uses the same content as yours.

Bad Bots:

Bad Bots are malicious bots. These little evil bots can damage your website to no extent.

Many site owners constantly lookout for these bots. Here are the types of bad Bots.

• Web Scrapers: These bots will steal content from your website to give it to others.
• Spam Bots: These bots are used for scams. You will mostly find these bots using the comment section of your website to scam people.
• DDoS Network Bots: These deadly bots will take down your website for several days. They use denial of service attacks to keep your site offline.
• Vulnerability Scanners: these bots will scan the vulnerability in your website and report it to others to take advantage of.

How to use Bot Traffic?

Many website owners use bot traffic to generate more traffic on their websites.

In today’s market, there are two types of bot traffic available.

1. Paid Bot Traffic:

Here you have to pay the agencies to generate traffic on your website. There are many agencies that offer paid bot services to clients.

2. Free Bot Traffic: 

Then we have, free bot traffic. This types of bot traffic are free. You don’t have to pay any money to use it.

They will generate traffic on your website for free.

However, there are only a few trusted agencies that will offer you free bot traffic. Most of the other bot traffic is either paid or fraud.

Free Bot Traffic: Good or Bad?

The most important thing for a website owner is “website traffic”.

If there is no traffic, there are no customers and no customer means no sales.

There are many ways through which a website owner can increase the number of visitors.

But the easiest and budget-friendly way is through free bot traffic.

Although the traffic generated will not be organic, sometimes website owners take these steps.

Free bot traffic has no value. It is only numbers and no quality.

It will deteriorate the quality of the traffic.

The most important thing that makes a website successful is Website Traffic + Quality of Traffic.

Only organic traffic adds value to the business. Bot traffic will only generate traffic that is of no value.

Sometimes free bot traffic may lead to bad bot traffic.

And once bad bots enter your website, you will be damned.

There are some advantages of free bot traffic but the disadvantages overpower it.

Here, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages to determine if it is good or bad for your website.

Advantages of Free Bot Traffic:

Here is a list of all the advantages of free bot traffic for your website.

• Generates Traffic:

They help you to generate more traffic on your website. In no time, the number of visitors to your website will increase.

• Increase Page Views: 

They increase the number of page views by visiting your website from time to time.

• Fast Results:

They generate more traffic very fast. Unlike all the other traffic generation tactics, bots give results in much lesser time.

The traffic will increase in a few hours on your website.

• Free: 

With free traffic bots, you don’t have to pay anything. You can use them for free to generate more traffic on your website.

It is cheaper than all the other techniques.

• Fewer Efforts: 

You don’t have to waste your time planning and implementing proper traffic generation techniques.

You can simply use traffic bots to do it with just one click.

Disadvantages of Free Bot Traffic:

Here is a list of all the disadvantages of free bot traffic for your website.

• It has no value: 

This types of traffic actually have no value. Only organic traffic has value. They are not real customers.

They will not make purchases, hence they are of no value.

• Penalty:

Free traffic bots can be illegal to use.

If Google finds out that you are using traffic bots to fake the number of visitors on your site and rank your site in search results, you will be penalized.

• The decrease in Conversion: 

The conversion rate on your website will decrease.

Conversion happens when visitors convert into actual customers by making a purchase.

However, bots cannot make a purchase, which eventually decreases the conversion rate.

• Higher Bandwidth usage:

As bots are continuously visiting your website to generate more traffic from different geolocation, they use higher bandwidth.

• Slows down Website:

Due to continuous bot visits, your website slows down.

And when actual customers try to visit your website, it takes too much time to load.

This way you will lose potential customers due to bot traffic.

• Incorrect Analytics: 

Google Analytics helps to check the number of page views, bounce rate, time spent on a page, etc.

This way you can easily check how your website is performing. But with bot traffic, the entire report gets mixed up.

The actual page visits get mixed up with bot traffic. You will get an incorrect analytics report.

• Junk E-mails: 

Free traffic bots lead to email spam or an increase in the number of junk emails. Bots generate spam emails in order to create fake traffic.

• Bounce Rate Increases: 

Bots make your website slow. Because of this customers are not able to visit your website.

Eventually, the customer or visitor bounces to another website, thereby increasing the bounce rate.

• Server cost increases: 

Due to the increase in traffic and higher bandwidth usage, these bots clog up the server. Because of this, you have to incur higher server costs.

So, these are all the advantages and disadvantages of free bot traffic.

What can I do about bot traffic?

Use the Cloudways bot protection feature to block bots from crawling your site.

Also, use Google Analytics and monitor your traffic.

If there is a sudden shift in the number of new visitors one day, it might be the result of bot activity on your website.

Pros and Cons of bot traffic

Pros:

– Helps with SEO.

– Unlimited bandwidth to crawl the entire web.

Cons:

– Not real users, can skew analytics data.

– DDoS attacks are easily performed with bots. Bots will all access your website at once causing it to overload and go offline.

Also, some bots are used for spamming which contributes to reducing the reputation of your website.

– If the bots are set on autopilot, it can cause problems on your server because they might be accessing too much information at once.

Which websites are most likely to have bot traffic?

Most websites that use SEO marketing will tend to have higher instances of bot traffic.

Websites with more content will receive more visits from bots because they are crawling for backlinks.

How can I check if my website has bot traffic?

You can use many programs to check bot traffic on your site, you can even do it manually by checking your Google Analytics dashboard and looking at the number of new unique visitors.

If you don’t have any traffic, you can always check your server logs.

Conclusion

It is clear that bot traffic is definitely bad for your website. They will not increase organic traffic or revenue for your business.

If you want to save your website from malicious activities avoid using free bot traffic. They will only add up problems for your website.

You can use Cloudflare CDN to stop bot traffic or you can change your host to Cloudways – they provide a premium bot protection plugin for free in their hosting packages.