Ive been working on the SEO of one of my websites - http://www.m0b1le.net and while trying to get a little more traffic to my site (through sneaky tactics) i've stumbled across something that worries me.
At the time I was trying to test the waters on if people use 2d barcoding to get traffic to their mobile sites, and I thought it a great idea to use my twitter account to tell the world about it. Ok maybe not the whole world, but at least my techy friends. So I setup a quick post with my description and a tinyurl link - to keep things tidy, and the usual suspects - the hash tags #mobile #barcodes at the end of the message. I posted my comment and went back to my stats page to double check the current unique user count for the day. This is where I saw something strange, and a bit worrying. Almost immediatly, the unique users climbed about 5 - 10 hits. This all in about 2 to 3 seconds. Page impressions did well too!
Surely this could not be right. So a few days later I tried again, and lo and behold the same result! this time a little bigger, more unique users, more page impressions.
I've not done to much research into the topic, and I think its worried me enough to warrant it, but I think its about time I find out what is actually happening.
No doubt there are robots constantly polling twitter feeds to surface content on web sites. When they come across a tag they have been told to track they show it up on the twitter gadget. But, why then do I have my whole site trawled with it? It feels alot like a sneaky bot looking for something. Its probably a bot because google analytics has no recognition of the traffic, so sadly my sneaky traffic trick didnt really help.
Just thought id put this out there incase anyone else stumbles across it.
Let me know if you too have had the same experience. Use the comments below.
Make the difference!
