Judah Phillips mentioned to me a post on SeoMoz about Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags and I wondered just how far one could take this "bad bot" from hell thing?
Well, how about creating bots that inflate traffic for sites deliberately? How far fetched is that in light of this post that Judah Phillips and the post he wrote last July.
Might we see pages that have stats like this one if we started to look for them more often?
The bots that can execute Javascript are not only becoming more numerous, but more sophisticated as well, mimicking human behavior in ways that make it harder to filter them out:
…we're seeing is some bots that are completely obvious (like the one that hits the same page over 1,000 times in rapid succession), and other cases that may well be bots, but it's hard to say. One can assume there is also more discrete bot activity mixed in there that isn't easily identifiable…
The motivations for creating bots that mimic human behavior and read Javascript tags are many:
….What if competitors and other unfriendlies decided to manipulate the system for their advantage? Or what if bored computer science students decided to mess with your web analytics rather than hack your root password? What if it became common for botnets to roam the Internet and toy with the analytics of random sites? And what if they were good at doing it - mimicking human behavior in relation to geolocation, browser type, time on site, pages crawled, etc?
In light of this post, one of the things I'd suggest doing .. become more conscious of strange patterns when they appear.
When you see behavior from "bad bots" on your sites, try to trace it back from where it came and figure out what the intent of the creator of the bot(s) is.
I don't know what else to say besides that about this behavior except that it's opened up my eyes to other possibilities of what makes up the traffic I may be looking at, in some case, in analytics packages.
