: Using scripts to visit site and leave immediately to lower Page Rank of competitors? Using Google Analytics, in the past week we've noticed an extremely high percentage of people visiting our
Using Google Analytics, in the past week we've noticed an extremely high percentage of people visiting our pages and leaving after less than one second. In some cases they are leaving after zero seconds...
Anyone versed in today's SEO knows that Google track's the "time on site" statistic and uses that to help determine their rankings in search.
What we think is happening is that a competitor might be doing this intentionally. Setting up CURL scripts or something to continuously visit a site and leave immediately, thus hopefully lowering our search rankings eventually. Perhaps they are doing it from multiple IP addresses, we can't tell using Google Analytics (or can we?).
Has anyone heard of this type of behavior? Is there a specific name for it? How do you combat it?
We've been considering tracking the time-on-site using window.load and window.unload and then recording the visited time along with the IP address in order to determine the IP addresses that are causing the problems.
Any clues?
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There are three ways google can track time on site that I know:
Through chrome browser statistics
Through google analtyics
The amount of time between the click on your link in the SERP and the time between the next click on the same SERP (indicating the user visited your site then went back to the results page for another link).
There have been a number of articles from google saying they don't use google analytics data in search ranking. That leaves chrome statistics and #3 above. Seriously manipulating chrome statistics would be a major chore for even advanced technology groups so it's unlikely this is the case.
Finally you have no control over #3 .
In summary, I wouldn't sweat it because you can't control it and it's unlikely that doing the type of attack you're suggesting would accomplish anything.
Speculation: Your competitor would probably have to send thousands of requests using unique chrome browsers from unique ip blocks to make google take any consideration from the attack. I don't think a few curl requests from a few different ip addresses would be enough to make google reconsider your site.
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