Not to mention that there are also some people so desperate for attention that they pay for visits (which they then turn around and use to brag about how popular their site is, to try to persuade others to use it).
One of the major embarrassments of a certain once-prestigious SF award ceremony, is that they've given out 50+ nominations for fan site/fan work/other categories (and several dozen rewards) to a site that turned out had always had 95% of its visits being from paid bots (even far surpassing the normal unpaid bots, let alone the dozen or less regular posters), with some of the bots really just existing to share the guy's material to make him sound more important and topical than he actually is. When people tried to point out his fake numbers, with evidence, his critics were slandered with charges of bigotry, etc.
