Doctored traffic stats in listings

Doctored traffic stats in listings

Worth flagging — a scam pattern several people surfaced this week.

— A BHW thread: sellers pasting Analytics screenshots from a different, healthier site, or from a brief paid-traffic spike.
— A reply notes others show inflated estimator numbers driven entirely by junk keywords no buyer would ever want.
— The fix going around: ignore seller screenshots entirely and pull your own third-party traffic estimate, then sanity-check the actual ranking keywords for relevance.

Editor's note: any stat the seller controls is marketing, not data. The keywords a site ranks for tell you more than the traffic total — a site 'getting traffic' from irrelevant or spammy terms is worthless to you.

Pick of the week: the thread on reading ranking-keyword quality instead of traffic volume.