What is Bot traffic?

Bot traffic is part of on-line/internet traffic comes from automated bot and unknown internet spiders.

Bot traffic is really hard to detect but according to authorized blogs sources it may be generated 10% to 25% of traffic. Each site automatically gets a set level of bot traffic.  So, the results is lower the human traffic than higher the bot traffic.

One another way to creates human made bots, when a publisher produces for himself bot traffic to generate artificial ads impression to make their client happy. By doing this they will get no revenue but getting huge amount of impression only.

There are two types of Bot available

1. Official Bots.

• Good bots are useful for providing numerous internet services, thus these are Good Bots.
• Search Engine Bot like Google Bot, Yahoo Slurp, and Bing Bot.
• Bots used for usability & response time management.
• E-reputation spider’s bots
• Advertising measurement bots.

2. Bad Bots.

• Email address Harvesting
• Automated account Sign-up (to create multiple email account)
• Content Spinning
• Blogs and Comments Span
• Click & impression fraud

Bot traffic wastes internet infrastructure resources and may affects web analytics and advertising.

Captchas are a good way to prevent bot traffic but they are also an annoyance for website visitors.

Brands Will Lose Billions to Bots in 2015

According to research by White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers, 11 percent of display ad impressions, 23 percent of video ad impressions, and 52 percent of sourced traffic is fraudulent. (Original Source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2385935/brands-will-lose-billions-to-bots-in-2015-study)

Report Highlights (https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2013.html)

Bot Traffic is up by 21%

Compared to the previous report from 2012, we see a 21% growth in total bot traffic, which now represents 61.5% of website visitors. The bulk of that growth is attributed to increased visits by good bots (i.e., certified agents of legitimate software, such as search engines) whose presence increased from 20% to 31% in 2013. Looking at user-agent data we can provide two plausible explanations of this growth:

• Evolution of Web Based Services: Emergence of new online services introduces new bot types into the pool. For instance, we see newly established SEO oriented services that crawl a site at a rate of 30-50 daily visits or more.
• Increased activity of existing bots: Visitation patterns of some good bots (e.g., search engine type crawlers) consist of re-occurring cycles. In some cases we see that these cycles are getting shorter and shorter to allow higher sampling rates, which also results in additional bot traffic.

31% of Bots Are Still Malicious, but with Much Fewer Spammers

While the relative percentage of malicious bots remains unchanged, there is a noticeable reduction in Spam Bot activity, which decreased from 2% in 2012 to 0.5% in 2013. The most plausible explanation for this steep decrease is Google’s anti-spam campaign, which includes the recent Penguin 2.0 and 2.1 updates.

SEO link building was always a major motivation for automated link spamming. With its latest Penguin updates Google managed to increase the perceivable risk for comment spamming SEO techniques, while also driving down their actual effectiveness.

Based on our figures, it looks like Google was able to discourage link spamming practices, causing a 75% decrease in automated link spamming activity.

Evidence of More Sophisticated Hacker Activity

Another point of interest is the 8% increase in the activity of “Other Impersonators” – a group which consists of unclassified bots with hostile intentions.

The common denominator for this group is that all of its members are trying to assume someone else’s identity. For example, some of these bots use browser user-agents while others try to pass themselves as search engine bots or agents of other legitimate services. The goal is always the same – to infiltrate their way through the website’s security measures.

The generalized definition of such non-human agents also reflects on these bots’ origins. Where other malicious bots are agents of known malware with a dedicated developer, GUI, “brand” name and patch history, these “Impersonators” are custom-made bots, usually crafted for a very specific malicious activity.

– See more at: https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2013.html#sthash.b9GmZz97.dpuf

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Written By 

Piyush

Digital Marketing Expert

@seobysearch.com