crawl spam

Noun phrase. High volume traffic that provides no value to the Website. Common sources of crawl spam include browsers set to prefetch large numbers of documents, email scraper programs, illegal crawlers used to scrape Websites for content, social media monitoring crawlers, and search engines that send little to no traffic to the sites being crawled. SEO practitioners doing link research drive a significant portion of Crawl Spam. Crawl Spam cannot be controlled through robots directives; this is rogue crawling traffic.