Never Use Bots to Improve SEO

Never Use Bots to Improve SEO

You have most probably heard about bots on the internet. Nowadays, bots have many different usages on the internet and have become an integral part of the virtual space. Bots help users to find the information they are looking for on the internet, process payments, order food and a lot more. But what is a bot?

What is a bot?

Bot basically is a software developed by a programmer to get a task done automatically. It’s technically a software that performs tasks with no need of a real operator. There are many good robots out there on the internet that are being developed in good faith! Such bots announce their presences and let you know what they are aiming to do on your website. On the contrary, there are bad bots on the internet that are developed for multiple reasons such as stealing information and contents from other websites, get access to sensitive information, leaving comments and creating traffic! 

What is a traffic generator bot?

A traffic generator bot is designed to create traffic on a website. Such bot generates non-human, fake traffic by repeating a task over and over, so the website’s CTR will be improved, though non-organically! Besides, this type of bots creates plenty of views on a single webpage, so the chance of ranking higher on search engines will rise. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Just wait until the end.

Shall it be used for SEO improvement?

Even though such traffic generating bots are tempting for website owners to take advantage of, there are many disadvantages associated with utilizing them for SEO enhancement purposes. We will go through the most important ones, so you will give it a second thought, if you have already planned to use them as a part of your SEO plan.

• Poor Quality Traffic

Traffic that is generated by bots are not from real users, so you cannot expect relevant audiences from your targeted market to visit your website. Even though, search engines would probably rank you high on their result page, so you might be expecting real users to click on your website link, that’d be for a short period of time, as search engines will identify the usages of traffic bots on your website sooner or later, so they would respond accordingly.

• Misleading Information

To analyze your website performance, you need to use some powerful tools such as Google analytics. Such tools provide you with some analytical data, so you will be able to identify the strength and weakness of your SEO plan. However, they will not separate the information coming from bots’ activities from the information that are due to real human activities on your website. Hence, you will not be able to identify how much of the traffic on your website is coming from bots and how much is generated by real users. Therefore, the decision you will make based on the results on Google analytics will not be a precise and realistic decision and can damage your whole website.

• High traffic and very low conversion rate

Since the traffic on your website is generated by bots, obviously no conversion will be in place. This is one of the ways that search engines identify that you are using bots to generate traffic. However, even if you are not spotted by search engines, what is the point of having traffic without conversion, as the final goal of any website is to increase their conversion rate!?

• Speed lowering

Traffic generator bots can overwhelm your website by sending much traffic. Your servers can be overcrowded by loads of traffic that are generated by bots, so the server will not operate well. As a consequence, your website’ speed will be lowered and in some cases, will not respond at all. Check out the importance of website speed and how to increase the website speed.

• Security Vulnerability

How traffic bots work is that they try to get their way into your website to create traffic. There is a security risk of such bots to report your weak entry points to their operators and pave the way for malicious bots to get into your website, steal your information, perform DDoS attacks and even take over your whole website and your customers’ financial information.

Bottom line

Bots are an integral part of the digital world. It goes without saying that even Google uses crawling bots to search through all websites on the internet in order to provide the best answers to users’ questions. Besides, research companies conduct their online research by using bots and like mentioned earlier in this article, these good bots announce their presence to the website owner and clear their purpose of crawling through your website. However, when it comes to SEO, it is not recommended to use traffic generator bots due to several reasons that were outlined above.

Keep in mind that the most effective way to increase your website traffic is to apply SEO best practices and standards, in order to organically increase your website’s traffic. Even though it takes a considerable amount of time and effort, it is definitely worth it, as you will be rewarded by a reputable website with a high conversion rate.