AceEngine

Question
What exactly are Hitbots and why can’t search engines tell if its coming from an actual human or some sort of software?

Answer
They’re little programs that constantly hit a site to create fictional traffic. It’s used in pay-per-click fraud quite a lot. Most blocking programs work on the basis that a human surfer will follow a number of different links in a site, but hitbots do that too now. They fake http referrer headers. You can try to spot them in different ways; one is consecutive IP addresses coming up. Another way is your traffic going through the roof!


Question
What is the difference between hitbots and clickbots?

Answer
Hitbots usually refer to programs that generate fake traffic to a site (back when people paid money for traffic, rather than conversions)


Clickbots usually refer to programs that click on certain things - typically PPC ads. Sometimes this is done on your own site in order to generate revenue, and sometimes it’s done on other sites in order to cost competitors money, thus removing them from competing with you for the ad slot.


The simple ones sit on a specific computer and repeatedly click on ads, but these are usually easily detected (especially by Google and Overture) because all the clicks come from a single IP address.


Current ones run automatically on a lot of different computers, sometimes owned by the clickbot owner in question, but more often by virus style “malware” that turns the computer in question into a zombie. In short, they take over your computer and use it for their own purposes. Since this creates thousands of different computers with different IPs that have no obvious connection to the scumbag in question, they are much harder to detect.


by: xan & lan


Click here to learn more on Click Fraud.