Alexa - Says I Have Pop Ups

[Hardwood Guy]

Okay...I know many say Alexa is a toy when guaging traffic and I agree with that. But they claim 3% of my sessions have pop-ups. How can that be? Or it just something else to ignore? I know of no pop ups. Can critters get into my site and do this?

[Brett_Tabke]

Strange how you think it is a toy and are concerned about it. There is no more accurate top 5000 list on the web today. Unless you have some hidden source of traffic listings?

>popups

Count you lucky stars. you are the proud owner of a site that has been touched by adware bots.

[Hardwood Guy]

"Count you lucky stars. you are the proud owner of a site that has been touched by adware bots."

That doesn't sound good. Could it have anything to do with affiliate links on the site? I've been told they are are parasite free. Can anyone elaborate?

[gethan]

Addware bots? - or scumware - www.google.com/search?q=scumware.

Basically software on a victims (windows) PC that does something it shouldn't. In the case that Brett refers to - your html is intercepted, and altered, adding in popups - which then get passed to IE, which is then interpreted by the Alexa tool bar as a popup. Examples: flyswat, gator.

Other possible causes:

_blank targets - I've had these blocked by the Alexa toolbar.
user requested popups - eg. See full image style javascript code.

I use these on various sites and they get classed as popups in alexa.

[Hardwood Guy]

Thanks forthe great reply gethan!

_blank targets-- I have many of those in a photo gallery. This sounds like it explains things quite well. You'll have to excuse my ignorance at times. Still a newbie to all this mumbo-jumbo.