Since more than a decade ago, members of the community that focuses on search engine optimization have debated the relationship between bot traffic and SEO success.
Over the course of this time period, the incidence of bot traffic and bot spam has significantly grown. Whether it is purposely negative or misleading black hat SEO methods, or as a by-product of other online marketing practices, a bad impact on a website’s search engine rankings is not a good thing.
The extensive background of our SEO agency Australia gives us confidence that your website will thrive under our best search engine marketing company. We can detail a variety of social media strategies that will increase your site’s traffic.
However, there are some unethical marketing companies that make use of bot traffic in order to trick their customers into believing that their advertising campaign is more successful than it actually is – but that is a topic for a different article. Bot traffic can also be used to deceive search engines.
This article will discuss the effects that bots have on search engine optimisation (SEO), as well as whether or not you should be concerned about bots causing harm to your organic search presence.
What exactly are these “Bots”?
Let’s first define what we mean by the term ‘bot’ before we get into the subject of whether or not bot traffic has an influence on search engine optimisation.
Bots are computer programmes that may conduct automated actions or scripts via the internet, gather data, or carry out certain activities such as crawling and indexing websites. Bots are also known as web crawlers. There are essentially two main types of bots, which may be roughly categorised as follows:
- Bots that are useful and carry out jobs that are necessary for the internet to function as it does today, such as crawling websites, indexing pages, and carrying out a variety of other tasks in the background.
- The kind of bad bots that get the most attention are the ones that are used to run illegal or damaging tasks that can cause damage to online web properties and perform tasks at a much higher rate than a human can.
These bots get the most attention because they are the kind that get the most attention. A website can be hacked or cracked using bots, which can lead to the acquisition of money or intellectual property.
Some Examples of Beneficial Bots
• Bots from search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu, and Yahoo
• Bots from marketing tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush
• Bots from social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest
• Bots that monitor websites in real time (Pingbacks, Network Monitors)
Harmful Bots
- Click Fraud Bots (Used to Manipulate and Exhaust CPC Spend)
- Scraping Bots [Bots Used to Manipulate and Exhaust CPC Spend] (Used to steal or scrape web content)
- Spam Bots (comments left on blogs and other forms of spam on the web in general)
- Malicious Attack Bots (DDoS bots targeting websites and apps)
Is Traffic Generated by Bots Unhealthy for SEO?
There is no inherent problem with bot traffic being detrimental to SEO. Visitors to a website who are not human and who arrive there either through referrals or direct sources are referred to as bots. Certain bots, like the ones used by Google Search, are vital to the usability and search engine exposure of a website.
While other bots, such as the crawl bots offered by Ahrefs and Semrush, are intended to give users with useful information.
On the other hand, certain other bots could be up to no good. Some of the traffic coming from bots is meant to “scrape” (get) useful information from websites (also called “data scraping”) or to get important information.
It is anticipated that by the year 2022, over half of all internet traffic would be generated by bots. There are malevolent bots making up a significant amount of that traffic, and their goal is to scrape as much useful information as they can from websites.
What does this imply for search engine optimisation then? In a tweet, John Mueller answered a user who had asked about the ramifications of bot traffic and SEO. To answer your concern, this is what Mueller said in response:
We have noticed that a significant amount of the traffic coming in comes from bots, even if it is labelled as organic traffic. Will this have a negative impact in any way, or does Google simply ignore it?
What Signs Point to the Presence of Bot Traffic?
There are a few telltale signals that your website is receiving traffic from bots, and they are as follows: The following are some of the most straightforward methods you may use to determine whether or not bot traffic has harmed your website:
Unusually high amount of page views; this often occurs on one or a small number of pages on your website; this is especially apparent when these pages do not rank well in organic search results.
Low session rates; bots will often just stay on your website for a few seconds before leaving after only seeing a single page.
Bounce rates that are extremely high; it is common knowledge that bots will only view a single page before leaving your website. The bounce rate of your site as a whole may be affected by bot traffic.
Spikes from the same place – because bots frequently share the same IP address, you may anticipate that the majority of your site traffic will originate from just one or two regions. This becomes more obvious when the visitors originate from countries in which you do not generally present.
Server performance – An appreciable decrease in server performance might be an indication of an increase in the number of bots using the server. There may be a connection between server overload and bot traffic having an effect on SEO, given the link that exists between the speed of the server, the speed of the website, and the performance of SEO.
The most efficient method for dissecting bot data and gaining an understanding of the possible ways in which they are visiting your website is to use Google Analytics.
JavaScript is used by Google spiders and web crawlers; hence, this data is not shown in Google statistics. It is far more probable for data to be generated by malicious bots when they are working on terms that are searched for using Google Analytics.
If you are uncertain about the origin of bot traffic, the best place to begin is by Googling the traffic source that you see in your Google Analytics report. This is the best place to start since it will give you the most relevant results.
In most instances, there will be reports from other webmasters who have already come across the same problem. You will be able to determine what actions need to be made based on the input that you receive from them.
Summary
So, does the traffic from bots have an effect on SEO?
The presence of bot traffic is not in and of itself harmful or negative. According to John Mueller, the most knowledgeable individual in the field of search engine optimisation (SEO) that we have access to, bots do not have an effect on the search engine optimisation of your website or the ranks that it receives on Google.
Although there are certain kinds of bots that may have an effect on the data that you view through reporting tools, in the year 2022, non-malicious bots will not have a negative influence on how you rank or appear in search results.
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