How Unscrupulous Publishers Fight Competitors or Invalid Traffic

The global Internet is going through hard times, in addition to viruses at every step in the virtual space, we have traffic bots that are used by SEO managers, who wind up behavioral factors by clicking on competitors’ sites, closing them after 1 second, and then after their dirty deed is done, redirect bots to the final site where they wind up excellent statistics with high engagement.

By the way, more than half of the Internet traffic falls on bots, and more than 90% of IPV6 addresses are used by bots and “marketing agencies”. This is sad because most of the mobile providers in the US and Europe use IPv6.

Interestingly enough, the bulk of invalid traffic comes from low-income countries with low cost of living, such as India. India is known for its programmers and tech support. Using a search on YouTube, where I found many videos about creating traffic bots. All of them were from India, which once again emphasized the skill of programmers from this eternally warm country.

Not necessarily all clicks or dishonest ways of fighting are used from the territory of India. Even more, all dishonest methods include the use of VPN.

What Dishonest Methods are Used by Publishers to Fight Competitors?

1. Of course, this is the use of bots, search bots, click bots.
2. Ad clicks. Yes, you may think that this is good for you until the moment Google blocks your account.
3. Cheat on behavioral factors. They visit your site, close it, which leads to a high bounce rate for you, and then they go to their site where bots spend most of their time winding up statistics and bringing their site to the top.
4. Hacking the site and placing malicious code or by stealing the control of sites.
5. Comments with malicious links or links to their site.
6. E-mails with malware. Don’t open nor click suspicious links. Just be careful, hackers are getting smarter and smarter.

How to deal with Unscrupulous Publishers that Dishonestly Combat Their Competitors?

1. Hang a captcha on the entire site, which will greatly reduce the interest of users when they first visit the site
2. Block suspicious traffic, IP addresses, which will lead to the possible loss of real visitors who will use this IP address in the future
3. Write a petition to Google about banning bots and boosting statistics. Asking them to rank sites only by the uniqueness and importance of the content. And not by the amount of traffic on the site.

What conclusions can be drawn?

Conscientious publishers can’t succeed simply by publishing quality and unique articles.

Basically, this is the fact that the Internet, and especially search engines, need reforms to combat low-quality content, a better anti-bot system, as well as anti-monopoly on blogging activities.

When I worked for a Russian advertising agency, they used a generic antibot system that simply did not count views or clicks of the bot, and did not pay for such clicks. Does this mean that an anti-bot system is possible in advertising? We hope that Google will introduce innovations soon. As well as the ranking of pages by importance and uniqueness, and not by the amount of traffic and the speed of loading the site.

This is an introduction to our corporate employees from a publisher’s point of view.