Recently, I was watching an auction on Flippa that eventually sold for over $100K.
I watched the auction becuase I was curious how much the market would pay for a site that seems to provide an inflated or fake traffic stats. This is only my assumption and you should not take my word for it becuase I could be wrong.
So let's discuss why I think the traffic stats are fake.
Basically, the site claims that it generates over 56% of its traffic from Organic search traffic from Google.
In total, the site generates 2.6 million visits per month. Yes. You read it right. 2.6 million visitors every month and 1.2 million of them from Google.
I find this traffic stats very hard to believe becuase the site is not that popular. Plus, the auction also fails to provide a list of keywords that it ranks for to justify this many organic traffic.
So it's really tough to verify that the organic traffic is real.
To my surprise, almost everyone watching the auction were seemed to be sold that the organic traffic is real and only one person out of the 70 comments questioned it.
I guess everyone was on the same notion at the time that I was that if it shows on the Google analytics that traffic is labeled Google / Organic, it must be real.
But when I put 1.2 Million Organic Traffic every month into perspective, I start become very skeptic. It is just so hard to beleive this site receives this many organic traffic.
So I started digging around and do my own due deligence.
One comment from the auction is that the main keywords that the site ranks for only have 8,000 searches in Google every month. Plus, the site only ranks #3 in the search results so it is likely only getting a third of that.
If this is the case, how can this website generate 1.2 Million Organic traffic every month?
Right away, I was sold that the traffic stats was fake.
But how can you fake the organic traffic stats? Google is so advance with their algoritm that it's bullet proof with any rigging.
At that point, my focus shifted to "how can I fake website traffic stats so that it looks like it is receiving organic traffic from Google?"
Thank goodness for Google search, I may have found my answer.
There are a few sites that provide traffic or solution to fake traffic referrers.
Basically they redirect the inbound traffic from anywhere and redirects it to Google before it lands on the website destination.
The result is, when traffic arrives on the destined site, Google analytics thinks the traffic it's getting is from Google.
Bingo!
These sites are so good at it that they are able to provide Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and even the new search engine DuckDuckGo as referrers.
Here are the two I discovered. There's probably more out there so if you know submit them on the comment.
FakeReferrer.com does not provide traffic but allows you to redirect your link via their shortening url so that if you share or use this link to buy traffic, the visitors will be rerouted to Google first before it arrives on your site. It cost $10 to shorten 10 URLs.
TrafficHitz.com provides traffic to your website that are reffered from Google and other popular sites like Facebook, Stumble, Tumblr etc. The price is pretty cheap $2 for 1,000 visitors. So I suspect that the traffic are most likely popunders or interstitials.
After this discovery, I had to test it for myself to make sure it really works. I've been seeing a lot of people selling websites on Flippa with huge organic traffic but the site doesn't even rank at all.
I own a content sharing website so I wanted to test the fakereferers for myself. Since I wanted traffic I used TrafficViews becuase it's an all in one solution to do my test. I'm sure I will get the same results if I used Fakereferers.
I purchased traffic referred from Google, Stumble, URL.com and DuckDuckGo
I did the test for about a month so I can really see the quality of the traffic and if it makes my stats look legitimate.
I buy popunder traffic all the time. Usually with 10 seconds average session duration and expectedly, TrafficViews have similar duration. So I think they use popunder traffic to provide visitors.
Surprisingly, it worked. My Google Analytics showed that the site received huge amount of organic traffic. This is upsetting to me becuase if this is possible, then people are getting scammed by thinking they are buying a website that is naturally receiving organic traffic.
Of course, for pros like me, we don't get fooled by this becuase all you really have to do is asked the seller to disclose the keywords that the site ranked for and then you do your research there. It's not that hard to tell.
Keep in mind that I'm writing this blog to inform you of what is possible out there and what are the available tools people can use to rig and fake traffic stats.
I'm not endorsing on rigging and faking your traffic. I beleive it's important for people to know that this stuff exist so they can be more informed and have better judgement next time they purchase a website on Flippa.
