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has anyone seen this trick - raise competitors bounce rate to make him lose rank

by lauren4u
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Please help!

I think a competitor is using a dirty black hat SEO trick to debunk me from my hard earned search position on google.

I monitor my visitors using a chat software livehelp now, and for a few days now I have noticed tons of refferals from google, which is theory is a good thing, however on closer inspection I noticed these are not actual people visiting my site, I believe they are bots, searching a specific term via google clicking on my listing and then exiting. I determined they are bots becuase most are reffered my the same ISP and they are using amazon ec2, please view visit characteristics below.

I have searched the internet on scripts which will do this, do you guys know of any? is it possible to lower a competitors bounce rate by doing this? my bounce rate is now at 37%. For over 3 years my bounce rate is a consistent 20-25%. Since this attack that has changed.

Here are the characteristics of each visit: please note the IP's vary, the location varies as well. but most seem to come from the same ISP

ISP: E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co.

Host name: ec2-52-88-234-22.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

IP: 52.88.234.22

refferer : google.com

Here's another visit:


ISPAMAZONCountry United StatesRegionVirginiaCityAshburnPostal Code20147LanguageenHost Nameec2-54-173-45-111.compute-1.amazonaws.comIP Address54.173.45.111 Browser Chrome 50.0
#bounce #competitors #lose #make #raise #rank #rate #trick
  • Profile picture of the author lauren4u
    any answers or is this one of the mysteries of seo?
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    Sex Vacation
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Thanks. This is a great example of why bounce rate can not possibly be as big of a factor as people think it is. Google isn't stupid, I'm sure they've thought about people hit botting the SERPs to manipulate them.

      This probably won't work and if it does, it will be short lived.

      And I think you mean raise you competitor's bounce rate.
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  • Profile picture of the author Synnuh
    User interaction with your site, along with how closely you're linked to already known, trusted sites are two big factors in figuring out if your site is trustworthy or not.

    If your site isn't trustworthy, or less trustworthy than your competition, it won't rank well.

    It's not necessarily bounce rate increasing or decreasing your rankings, but it helps give a big picture analysis to your site, based on trustworthiness and perceived usefulness of your site to the keyword, in Google's eyes.

    In other words, if your competitor has a lower bounce rate than you, all other things equal, their rankings are going to be higher than yours.

    If site #1 has a 80% bounce rate for "blue widgets" and site #2 has a 65% bounce rate for "blue widgets", which is more relevant to Google's visitors, algorithmically speaking? As far as code can see, the second site is more relevant to "blue widgets" searchers.

    Yeah, it works. Both ways. You can use CTR bots and microworkers to increase your SERPs, too.
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Synnuh View Post

      Yeah, it works. Both ways. You can use CTR bots and microworkers to increase your SERPs, too.
      Bullshit..
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      • Profile picture of the author Synnuh
        Originally Posted by irawr View Post

        Bullshit..
        Sounds good, though, right?
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        • Profile picture of the author irawr
          Banned
          Originally Posted by Synnuh View Post

          Sounds good, though, right?
          Oh yeah, sounds great, so I run a bot to cheat my site up the SERPs.

          Until you read the patents they already have in place to defend against those tactics.

          There's also no evidence anywhere that it works, just a bunch of hearsay.

          It can cheat trends and screw with local, there's no way you can bot enough in a manner that will fool Google in global SERSPs. They have more data about traffic then anybody, how are you going to produce fake traffic that won't stick out? I doubt anybody even knows what natural traffic looks like other than about 5 people at Google.

          There's also been people cheating trends forever.
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  • Profile picture of the author Synnuh
    Those same patents show they're using the technology. You're giving them more credit than they deserve.

    Go on Fiverr, get a reputable GSA vendor to throw a couple blasts at one of your competitors. Send the links through an indexer.

    Get on MicroWorkers and hire up 1,000 views with US based proxies.

    Make sure you're paying them to view other content and keywords related to your niche, then search your keywords, bounce from your competition, and move through your site. Hover on the site for a few minutes, then search for something completely unrelated to your niche.

    You're going to get me banned with this shxt lol. Each, on their own, isn't enough. The links need to match the user behavior from sources Google can accurately track -- their search results, and your visitors search history.

    I doubt anybody even knows what natural traffic looks like other than about 5 people at Google.
    If you knew what natural traffic looked like, and remember you're dealing with a computer programmed algorithm & managed database, you'd have a lot easier time getting search traffic.

    You do realize other companies own web crawlers, and spend massive amounts of money harvesting and processing data? Google isn't the only data mining operation in town. There's an entire industry based around it.
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Synnuh View Post

      Those same patents show they're using the technology. You're giving them more credit than they deserve.

      Go on Fiverr, get a reputable GSA vendor to throw a couple blasts at one of your competitors. Send the links through an indexer.

      Get on MicroWorkers and hire up 1,000 views with US based proxies.

      Make sure you're paying them to view other content and keywords related to your niche, then search your keywords, bounce from your competition, and move through your site. Hover on the site for a few minutes, then search for something completely unrelated to your niche.

      You're going to get me banned with this shxt lol. Each, on their own, isn't enough. The links need to match the user behavior from sources Google can accurately track -- their search results, and your visitors search history.



      If you knew what natural traffic looked like, and remember you're dealing with a computer programmed algorithm & managed database, you'd have a lot easier time getting search traffic.

      You do realize other companies own web crawlers, and spend massive amounts of money harvesting and processing data? Google isn't the only data mining operation in town. There's an entire industry based around it.
      Uh, Banned for what?

      That's not an accurate test but there's certainly a test I can try that is accurate. I have some old sites I might try this on but I'm not letting anybody on fiverr point GSA at one of my sites. I guarantee you, even if it works, that it's a complete waste of my time.

      There's a reason that I only do whitehat. At some point I learned that there's no point in trying to fake it when you can just do it the right way. I'm not talking about greyhat stuff, I don't really do that stuff either but that's different. If an issue ever arose you can just fix it assuming that it was done the right way in the first place.

      On second thought, unless this can pull an extra 10k a month from a handful of sites I don't see myself doing it and I already know it can't. So why don't you setup 4 sites, run gsa into one, the jobs into another, then combine them into a 3rd, leave a 4th for a control. Make sure the sites are all pretty similar.

      And you know what? Don't tell me how it works out and don't tell anybody else. If it works, great, you're making extra money, good for you. Setup a ton of sites and get rich off it.

      My prediction: if the jobs provide any benefit what so ever, it won't be cost effective, and as soon as you turn the jobs off, the benefit will rapidly vaporize. I also think the jobs will have serious diminishing returns. A small amount of them here and there might prop your site up a bit.

      As far as the natural traffic comment, I think I admitted I don't know as much as some people. I'm not sure what you mean by that.

      I've said this before; Google is a company worth half a trillion dollars that employees an army of PHDs. If you figure out a way to outsmart them, you better get rich off it, but I never understood why you wouldn't just use the system they setup the way it was designed to work. There's plenty of people who disclose the fact that they got rich off Google and it's pretty hard to hide anything as a marketer on the internet. You can just go and look at their site to see how they did it.

      Edit: Also, a couple of GSA blasts from fiverr into my competition would do absolutely nothing to their site. It might annoy them having to see those links in their SEO tools, that's about it.
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  • Profile picture of the author FreedomBlogger
    Oh that is very low from your competitors (assuming they are really doing this to you)!

    This is definitely something that a mean-smart-competitor can do to someone - to knock them out of the game.

    The Bounce Rate of your website is very important for search engine rankings. As you probably already know, Search Engines Track Everything - because their main priority is Their Users, right.

    Doing this, and messing around with your bounce rate is such a crappy move from competitors!

    But here is one interesting thing to keep in mind - I believe the search engines will be able to differentiate a real visitor from a bot. If this holds true, then it would not really matter if someone is sending bots to your site to mess with your bounce rate.

    This is something I will definitely have to research more about. It is a very interesting topic and news!

    Thank you for sharing this @lauren4u!

    I guess, only time will tell.

    Do let us know how your rankings look like in a few months!
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    • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
      Originally Posted by FreedomBlogger View Post

      The Bounce Rate of your website is very important for search engine rankings. As you probably already know, Search Engines Track Everything - because their main priority is Their Users, right.
      No, it's not. Google only knows the exact bounce stats for smallish percentage of all sites so this would be inaccurate to the point of being totally useless. And as far as I can remember they've said that they don't even use Analytics data for these purposes.

      You know how to make your bounce rate soar? Run a campaign of any sort. Adwords, YouTube, FB, even SEO in some cases... Doesn't matter. Why would Google punish a site that's actively marketed?

      Are clicks from Google search and bounces back a factor? Possibly, but I very much doubt that it's such an important factor that clicking your own links would help much.
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      Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
      Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

      What's your excuse?
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