All You Need to Know About Free Bot Traffic

It has become more difficult for publishers and marketers to overcome the surge of non-human traffic or bot traffic, as it is also known. According to data security service company Barracuda Networks, bots accounted for roughly two-thirds of internet traffic worldwide in the first half of 2021. Malicious bots generated nearly 40% among all traffic. Bot traffic is essential to digital ad fraud, expected to cost $100 billion by 2023, up from $35 billion in 2018.

What Is Bot Traffic?

Non-human traffic to a website is referred to as “bot traffic.” Whether a well-known news site or a startup with a modest following, every website eventually attracts a slew of bots. It is common for the phrase “bot traffic” to be misunderstood as detrimental. However, this isn’t always the case. There’s no denying that some of the free bot traffic out there is malevolent and has the potential to skew the results of Google Analytics. 

In certain instances, these web crawlers may be used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults. Some bots, such as those used by search engines and digital assistants, are necessary for the proper functioning of the web. In order to distinguish between human activity and bot traffic, digital publishers need to analyze their analytics data.

What Is Good Bot Traffic?

In contrast to the examples above, what examples of positive bot traffic can you point to? The bots listed below are real and exist to support websites and apps.

  • A Search Engine Robot

Most people are familiar with “good” bots, such as search engine bots. Crawling the web is one way that search engine bots assist website owners in having their sites appear in the search results of major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These SEO bots come in handy.

  • Monitoring Bots

Using monitoring bots, publishers may keep an eye on their website’s health and performance to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible. Monitoring bots periodically check to see whether the site is still up and running by sending a ping request. When anything goes wrong, or the site goes down, the publisher will get an immediate notification from these bots.

  • SEO Crawlers

Crawlers for SEO gather and index data about a website’s visitors, users, and content using software designed to do just that. Web administrators may then use these statistics to organize their content to increase their referral traffic, search exposure, and organic traffic.

  • Copyright Bots

Copyright bots scour the internet for photos marked as copyrighted, ensuring that no one is making unauthorized use of this protected property.

What Is Bad Bot Traffic?

In contrast to the beneficial bots we’ve just discussed, bad bot traffic may significantly harm your website if it goes unchecked. The form of this activity may range from delivering spam or misleading traffic to something significantly more disruptive, like ad fraud.

  • Denial of Service (DDoS) Networks

It is safe to say that the DDoS bot is one of the most venerable and dangerous bots out there. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) bots are malicious programs installed on a victim’s PC and then utilized to bring a website or server to a grinding halt. According to Network Security service provider Corero, a DDoS assault in the United States costs an average of $218,000 per victim.

  • Web Scrapers

Web scrapers look through web pages for useful information, like email addresses and phone numbers. In rare cases, individuals may be able to copy and paste content from a website or social media profile and use it elsewhere without authorization.

  • Click Fraud Bots

There are a large number of highly developed bots driving harmful traffic only to adverts that have been paid for. In contrast to other bots, these bots are involved in ad fraud. Non-human traffic, as the name indicates, delivers clicks to sponsored advertisements and costs, advertisers billions of dollars each year. Publishers have various reasons to use bot detection techniques to sift out illegal traffic, which is sometimes camouflaged as genuine traffic.

  • Vulnerability Scanners

Malicious bots examine millions of websites for security flaws, which they report to the programmers. Malicious bots, as opposed to legitimate ones, are programmed to convey data to a third party, who may sell it or use it to get into other people’s websites.

  • Spam Bots

Their creators create automated comment spambots to post remarks on a site’s comment area. These bots must generate accounts, and although CAPTCHA checks are intended to detect software-driven account creation, they are not always successful.

Conclusion

Bot traffic may be very expensive for any organization with a web presence if ignored. A customized bot control system is the most effective method for reducing abusive bot traffic. Sigmatraffic can help you monitor and identify bot traffic for your digital publication. Using Sigmataffic, a free bot traffic provider, digital publishers can make the most of their ad space. With cutting-edge advertising technology and reasonable, ethical assistance, Sigmatraffic has helped its customers increase their ad income by an average of 55% since 2015.