Ask HN: A practical use for bot traffic

1 pointsbwagy11y ago2 comments

As a by-product of I do in my day job we detect paid bot traffic. Just thinking there must be some practical uses for them - maybe in testing? Any ideas? Just curious

2 comments

_Kenny11y ago

As it is not my day job, can you elaborate on what is bot traffic?

tjtang11y ago

Bot traffic I'm guessing is from spiders and scrapers.

And paid bot traffic is probably hits to artificially increase your website traffic so it seems more popular. Maybe this helps with SEO?

Another guess, it can be used for load testing websites. And if you are on the receiving end perhaps you could redirect them somewhere else using your .htaccess file. Probably lots of this on Fiverr.

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