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I was thinking I had a nice increase in site traffic on this and another site until I started looking more closely at the site statistics.

It turns out, there is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spammer–a crawler bot that doesn’t behave properly–that was bumping my visit/view stats. While it was cool for my ego, it generated a lot of worthless statistics on the sites and didn’t reflect actual visits or views by real folks. What I mean by not behaving properly is this. A crawler, like the Google, Yahoo! and other search engine bots, behave in such a way that their visits and page views only gather information on the site (content, key words and such) without leaving visit/statistics. They also obey site instructions on what can be collected and what pages can be visited. Those instructions are generally set in robots.txt files, or the HTML tags.

See robotstxt.org for more information on adding a .txt file or meta tags to your site.

Anyway, the outfit that was traffic spamming my sites is Semalt. If you go this location, you can opt your site(s) out of Semalt’s activity.

So, now my traffic is back to its normal, low level. Darn!