Looking for some SEO advice here. I regularly see people advertising bot traffic packages that send 1,000s of visitors to your site to inflate it's "visitors". I understand why people think this may be a good idea - e.g. some people vainly think it helps Alexa rankings - as well as the more nefarious reasons - e.g. "pump-and-dump" when selling website. But I'd love thoughts on whether fake traffic such as this being sent to your website can impact on search rankings - i.e. is the Google algo smart enough to know your traffic is fake, and if you get lots of it (and here I guess Google would presume it's you that bought it) penalise you for it? What do you think?
it would have some impact on your ranking but hard to say how much. if you look at your analytics, you will see your bounce rate. when you buy bot traffic, your bounce rate will sky rocket which in turn can impact on your ranking. how long visitors stay on your site and how many pages on average they visit determines your site quality and google knows that.