I was wondering what are some of the ways to detect bots and fake traffic? Are there types of patterns? What are the signs that point to a large amount of fake traffic on a site? Any help will be greatly appreciated thanks!
Google ignores all (or most, except for those home-grown ones) bot traffic. So you won't be able to see them in your Analytics report. I usually use a custom script to monitor unusual traffic. You can also retrieve information, such as IP address or user-agent from your raw server log. I usually dig through to see if there's any bot taking up my bandwidth and resources. Here's a site I use to check the IP address of the suspicious traffic: http://www.projecthoneypot.org Hope this help.
I am new to the world of blogging and internet marketing and never thought of "fake" traffic or bot activity affecting analytics reports. Thank you for the great information! Is it common to receive large amounts of "fake" traffic?