Why Not All Traffic Is Good Traffic
Web traffic; it’s the “money-maker” for many webmasters. But is all traffic really a good thing? Well, this is a topic that isn’t quite “black and white” so to speak. Traffic can have many affects on a site, both positive and negative. Ultimately, good traffic is defined as frequent visitors, or a visitor who buys your product (if you’re selling something). Bad traffic, on the other hand, consists of mostly anything else: spam, abusers, web-surfers, etc.
We will begin by discussing the positive effects of all traffic. Having good traffic, obviously, cannot hurt you. There is no way that comes to mind that I can think of in which good traffic will hurt your site; be it resale value or otherwise (thus its name, “good” traffic). If you’re getting tons of good traffic, your site is booming, and if you ever want to sell it, that raises it’s value!
Now, bad traffic can also have some (temporarily) “positive” effects. If you’re running a site which does not worry about visitor comments spam hits and robots shouldn’t be much of a problem for you. In fact, they may make your stats look great at first glance, and you may even be able to catch a gullible buyer and convincing him or her (by not saying anything more than to look at the visitor count) that the traffic is great! However, for those serious domainers, etc. they will check those stats down to the IP’s of the visits. When they track back all those IP’s to public proxies, and known spam bots they will throw the name back in your face and your sale will fall through.
So in the end, all traffic does not quite turn into good traffic. It is indeed a great factor for any sale of a site, but visitor turn around is what really matters. So when analyzing your own traffic, check as if you were buying your site up and take steps to minimize spam traffic!
Regards,
Dennis M.