An SEO professional was concerned about a phenomena they had witnessed: bot traffic to a keyword.
They claimed they saw a traffic bot to a site that was being used to manipulate Google ranking. They are in Vietnam, and a lot of SEO providers there use bots to drive traffic for a keyword.
So the variation keyword would be SEO services or advanced SEO services.
They saw that traffic increased from 20 or 30 search volume to over 30,000 as a result of using these traffic bots, in just one week because of this manipulation.
They were curious if this kind of bot was able to influence rankings and if there were negative impacts.
John explained that while it’s hard to say, the one aspect is that they don’t use bot traffic to a keyword as a ranking signal.
Although it may feel like you’re seeing something in the tools when you examine these metrics, it may not actually be the reason for the change that you are really seeing in the search results.
It’s also possible that other sites may have dropped out of the search results at the same time.
He explained to beware of external tools that might show so much traffic going to a person’s website.
It’s also been the case that the tools have reported a site is seeing a major drop in traffic, but Google’s internal tools are not seeing any major issues with this.
This happens at approximately the 50:14 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 8 50:14
Can you hear me? I have some questions about tools people use to manipulate the Google ranking. Yeah, I saw the…Vietnam, I’m in Vietnam, and I saw the local site in Vietnam about SEO service. Yeah, SEO service. They try to use the traffic bot, to drive traffic for this keyword.
And, its variation about it. SEO services just like best SEO service or something. And I see the ranking I see the traffic, it grew from 20,000 to 30,000 for them in just one week, just one week for all various [inaudible] and the ranking, and the website appears from nowhere to the top one. So, what do you think? Do you think it would factor negatively on the marketplace or something?
John 51:29
I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I think one one really tricky aspect there is that we don’t use something like that as a ranking signal. So it feels like you might be seeing something in your tools when you look at that, which is not actually the reason for the change that you’re seeing in search.
It might be, for example, that maybe other sites just happened to drop out of the search results at that time. And because of that, we ended up showing something that was less visible previously. But it also sounds like you might be seeing some kind of almost like a search quality issue, in that perhaps it’s not a spammy site.
I, I don’t know. Like since you didn’t mention. It’s just an SEO site.
SEO Professional 8 52:25
Yes. It’s a SEO service site. Yeah. Yeah. As to webchat. I guess I couldn’t share my screen for a visual look. But actually, I have a tweet. I have a tweet about this case study. So can I drop my links to this comment? Yes…
John 52:42
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Put it in the chat. And then I can pick that up. And I can show that to the team here as well to double check. But I think it’s really tricky, especially when you look at things like search volume, because that’s something that, the external tools, they can just guess. You can’t really know…,
SEO Professional 8 53:05
— keyword just 43. But organic traffic is 27,000 organic traffic for all the queries for SEO service. It’s quite crazy and maybe [inaudible] search marketplace.
John 53:23
Yeah. Yeah. I, I don’t know, I feel it’s really tricky when you’re looking at kind of external tools and saying like, “Oh, this other person’s site is getting so much traffic,” because I’ve also seen cases where the tools have reported that a site is seeing a big drop in traffic, and then the site itself is like, what changed? I don’t see any change.
SEO Professional 8 53:49
Yeah, I see. It’s kind of tricky. But I hope you can keep an eye on this. In Vietnam [inaudible] it appears too much.
John 54:04
I don’t know. Like, if I can fix too much, but yeah, I am happy to pass it on to the team to double check. Thanks.
