: Do easy scripts like this make site traffic meaningless? Do easy scripts like this which generate can traffic massive amounts of traffic in a way that seems 'natural' make site traffic meaningless?

@Pope3001725

Anagio, The code shown in that post it's obviously an improvised proof the concept. But it I guess it can be easily improved to forge a more realistic interaction (the author even suggests some approaches). Don't forget that the advertising industry pays per visit and amount of content delivered, so more traffic can in fact mean more money.

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@Annie201

I know a few companies who purchased services to get more visits they soon realized the traffic they were getting was fake and from a program because people are monitoring the time visitors spend on a page, they monitor click streams to see if visitors have gone from one page to another. They monitor where the traffic has come from and with Analytics programs that monitor IP along with all other details it's quite easy to see if traffic is fake.

I feel bad for the people who don't know any better and purchase visits from companies that send fake traffic.

To answer your question. Yes it's meaningless. Why would someone want to have fake traffic to their website? If a visitor isn't buying a product, signing up for a service, or contacting the website owner. 1,000,000 visits wouldn't mean anything. They would be essentially worthless and a waste of bandwidth.

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@BetL925

Site traffic is a useful metric under some circumstances, but scripts like the one discussed in your link, along with the many other ways of drawing links to sites (posting a link in a prominent forum on a busy social website along with a suitably alluring description, for example -- I do not recommend doing this!), mean that more thought has to go into analysing the results than just counting the number of hits on the site.

Advertisement agencies have become very good at detecting 'clickthrough fraud' - hits generated by bots or human agencies that do not really represent a genuine hit, where genuine is loosely defined as 1) a human being is involved, 2) this site/page was reached intentionally and 3) the site/page was accessed in good faith. In the case of this tor example, the target site would see a fairly uniform succession of hits (random pause between 40 and 60 secs), which would not ordinarily be generated by human activity, I don't see any HTTP_REFERER, and there does not seem to be any mechanism for the script to progress through the site (e.g. simulating clickthroughs from one page to the next). This sort of activity could probably be detected as anomalous/non-human in origin. As an incidental aside, it's quite likely that analytics sites already hold lists of Tor exit nodes, since that information is tracked.

More generally, this sort of thing is one reason why those looking to demonstrate site reach, audience or impact should look beyond the raw number of frontpage hits, since there are many ways of generating hits that do not result in any real interaction with the site.

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