This is a serious warning about untargeted traffic and how it can actually harm your website's search engine ranking. The latest Google penguin and panda update effected many webmasters who either used false techniques (that are still common these days) or had sites that were not as relevant as they should have (at least in Google's eyes). But there is one more factor that webmasters must take into consideration and it's untargeted traffic.

Untargeted traffic is basically visitors who pay a visit to your website but the content of the website is not relevant for them so they usually leave or bounce out of your website. High bounce rate is a significant factor for ranking as the top ranking sites should be more interesting and relevant for the visitors which is basically what Google aim to deliver as otherwise users will use other search engines instead.

Untargeted traffic can come from various sources:

• Media Buying - buying media on websites that are not closely related to the content of the targeted website - for example, adult, torrent websites and so on.
• Traffic selling services - such as these listed on the Buy Traffic Guide. Some services sell untargeted traffic that can never be related to anything and causes visitors to bounce from the target sites (sometimes in less than a second - pop under/up blockers).
• Social networks - Traffic from social networks is not always relevant, visitors having spare time spend it on social networks and click on links without even knowing what's behind them.

Even targeted traffic can be bad if the target content does not meet the expectation - for example: a news website that is not up to date will cause visitors to abandon it quickly (although in some cases Google will expect this type of visitor behavior from certain websites).

The bottom line is that as a webmaster you should be the guard at the entrance to your website and make sure you receive the traffic from the right sources, this can only do good in terms of sales, leads and even ranking.