Though it’s clear they wouldn’t mind being kicked off Google’s SERPS since they’re achieving their publicity through Google Analytics instead. 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. 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. Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”.

Trafficbot life google analytics