I admit. I do SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Why? Because it still works and it is free and brings real traffic. Through my skills I managed to push a website of mine at position #3 or #4 for a widely user query. Thanks to that, the traffic exploded:
And the proof, that the traffic comes from search engines:
As you see 75% is search related. And the service I offer is very competitive. The main keywords return between 2.2 million and 7 million results in Google. Not bad :-). According to some online tools, those keywords are searched between 300 and 5000 times a day on Google. It is important to be on the first few spots to get the people. And here comes the problem. As you see in the graph above, I had a strong drop in traffic a few days back. The reason was that somebody was abusing my service, creating thousands of fake accounts and almost killing the system and server. After some research I discovered that they bad person always used the same process which concludes it must be a bot. After blocking the IP, User Agent and any other information I had, it stopped and the system is up running normal.
But who would use such bad techniques against my service? Well, it must be somebody that wants my spot on the search engine results page. I do not know who it was but I know why they did it:
If my service would be unavailable Google would drop my rankings and the competitor would rise up. If you do this often enough, you get a top 10 rank or even better. Pretty ugly way! I will report the site to Google as soon as I have some evidence.
Have you ever experienced something similar? Or do you think it is okay to DDoS your competition?
What _service_ are you talking about? 😉
If I wanted to talk about, I would have linked to it 😀
Don’t be that shy. Reveal the link! 😉
nah, I prefer to keep it to myself 😉