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How to Falsely boost Your Page Viewers & How to Detect Those That Do Forget click farms, there are far more shady ways to boost your page's view count, but at what cost?

By Rustam Singh

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In a world run by clickbaits, advertorials, paid news, sponsored content and referrals, it's hard to understand who or what is behind making something go viral. All computers and digital servers' record are mere clicks, not the implementation of those clicks or where those clicks lead to actual profitability by a business, or who is really clicking them. Of course, now servers have gotten much more advanced and several preventative ways to stop fake clicks to register, but in this constant cat and mouse game between fake publicity and reaching our genuinely towards a real population, the battle is cut throat. Here's everything you need to know about how to spot a fake testimonial:

Understand how servers detect a fake testimonial. Severs are designed to work on eliminating spam or fake clicks using several factors, but that doesn't sound spammy websites to do their thing. Here are several ways that dodgy businesses increase their page counts:

Location based filter bypass

Location based filters could prevent any clicks from an obscure country to be registered as a view or a click. For example, you can program your count to count only your country's click thus preventing obvious digitally manipulative content. How do companies dodge those? They use proxies, multiple different location proxies fake your location and clearing your cache sometimes tricks the server to think it's a different computer and different user. Advance proxies can help you fake a location with surgical precision, and you can even use one on your phone (or use a VPN).

Reverse searchable content

If the comment or content has obvious generic content, a simple pre-programmed reverse search will be see how much the same content has been previously used. How do companies dodge those? They simply search for stock photographs with multiple people/faces in high resolution. Most reverse search engines fail to detect photographs extracted through group shots.

Multiple pings from the same computer

To prevent the most common form of spam, using the same IP to make multiple entries can be easily detected by any basic anti-spam filter. This is where Captcha comes in handy to prevent. Again, to dodge those, companies use a safety browser like ToR, or change their IP using a proxy or VPN.

Bought testimonials

Websites like Fiverr exist to make you realize that nothing in the entire world can be trusted. For a fractional cost, you can get paid testimonials of volunteers with demonstrated experience in doing the same. How do you detect those? This involves careful viewing and viewing a pattern to look for a seemingly genuine review, which most customers/clients don't do so you're mostly safe.

Redirecting traffic from anonymous forums

Websites like 4Chan, Reddit, 9Gag etc receive a large amount of daily traffic, that involves unverified users to log in and share unidentified data. Just a little of twisted words here and there, and companies will add a clickbait headline that makes thousands if not millions of users ready to click their headline. While nobody can know companies are promoting their own content, it will generate traffic.

While these methods may or may not be traceable, eventually the bottom most important fact that this traffic is just fake traffic, and not actual customers or clients that are genuinely interested in your website. Of course, you might be able to get an inflated number of daily users, but at what cost? Is it even worthwhile just to get a better advertising budget at the cost of losing out on the genuine clients if you're ever exposed virtually? That's for you to decide.

What not-so-moral tricks have you heard or tried to jack up your daily viewers? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India

Rustam Singh

Sub-Editor- Entrepreneur.com

Tech reporter.

Contact me if you have a truly unique technology related startup looking for a review and coverage, especially a crowd-funded project looking to launch and coverage.

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