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They’re showing that their product works, without actually harming anyone – except of Google Analytics’ credibility of course! What Can you Do About it? Not to mention that they’re sending this spam to potential customers, and they don’t want to DDoS their sites and piss them off! In fact, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper to do this instead of sending actually traffic to people’s websites. This shouldn’t be resource intensive at all.
#Trafficbot . live code#
If I had to guess, I would say that the spammers are scraping your Google Analytics ID and using the GA code to execute the JavaScript and create fake traffic.
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Though it’s clear they wouldn’t mind being kicked off Google’s SERPS since they’re achieving their publicity through Google Analytics instead.
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So I guess their strategy is working?Įxcept I hope that Google doesn’t look too kindly on this kind of manipulation and penalizes them heavily. They’re hoping that people will write about it (like this article!), and retweet the problem (like Google’s John Mueller did). Their entire strategy is to spam thousands of websites with fake traffic to a fake page, so that it generates a lot of buzz. And yet Google Analytics was showing that it existed! And apparently, I wasn’t the only one. There was no real traffic my site to a non-existent page called “trafficbot.live”. The only 404s I got were from my own IP address when I checked to see if my site was hacked and if such a page actually existed. Even more surprising, my server registered no “404” pages that I would expect when someone tried to visit a non-existent page on my site.
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To my surprise, both of them showed nothing unusual! No spike in traffic of this magnitude that would explain the huge numbers I was seeing in Google Analytics. I accessed both my raw server logs, as well as the analytics on Cloudflare. Analysis: The Traffic Doesn’t Really Exist! I was surprised however, that my in-built firewall protections didn’t disable them before the count got so high. I have a number of tools to deal with these. Our best advice for now, annoying as it may be, is to ride it out.Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”. In most cases, website owners are seeing a burst of spam for a limited period of time. Using the filter above may help you get a better picture of the true number. However, this number is merely a calculation based on the pageviews in Google Analytics the spam doesn’t impact earnings at all. If you run ads on your site, and depending on the types of ads you run, you may see a lower-than-normal RPM calculation due to this spam. However, if you want to get a better idea of your real traffic, you may be able to filter it out by following these instructions. The good news is it's not causing any type of security or load issues on your server. This traffic is often referred to as analytic spam because it only shows up in analytics but doesn't ever register on your server.īecause it's spam that isn't hitting your server, there's unfortunately nothing we can do to block the traffic (as there isn't actually any traffic to block!). The current bot traffic we're seeing is going to nonexistent URLs that end with something like trafficbot.life, bottraffic.live, bot-traffic.icu, trafficbot.live, or bot-traffic.xyz.Īlthough it's hard to say exactly what these bots are after, it's not unusual for a website owner to suddenly notice a large amount of bot traffic in their Google Analytics (or other tracking platform) stats.
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