You got bots?

The devil is in the details. I remember once seeing a traffic spike and excitedly running off to report my success to the executive suite.

In my mind, at that moment, I had won the day, and some magic I performed on this website was suddenly driving considerable traffic.

Finally! All my hard work was paying off! Woot!

I was also young and stupid, and I was lucky my pal stopped me right as I headed into the executive’s office. “I think it is a bot,” he told me.

He was right; the traffic was an anomaly and not actual traffic. I was crushed and mortified that I had not further researched the spike before alerting my colleagues to my success.

I wouldn’t say I like the hard lessons, no matter how good they are for us in the long run, but I am glad I learned this one early in my career when I was dealing with much smaller numbers.

The lesson I learned: Research findings before announcing success.

Unfortunately, the problem isn’t getting any better with the onslaught of bot traffic attacking our websites. Because I am helpful like that, I pulled together a few tips for finding bot traffic and how to mitigate it a bit. 

We fix being naive with experience; bots are an entirely different story.