Questionable Traffic Spikes, need advice

Wondering what could cause traffic spikes.

[dakuma]

Hey everyone,

I'm fairly new to domain parking and domaining in general, but have managed to purchase 70 or so domain names. Among the first 20 or so names was a site/name that was eventually taken down by my parking affiliate <edit> for questionable traffic </edit>.

Now a couple of months later another domain, suddenly had a traffic spike.

My question is, how can this happen? Is there any chance at all that this could be legitimate traffic?

And second, should I email my parking affiliate to alert them to this issue?

Thanks for any advice :)

[edited by: Webwork at 5:30 am (utc) on Mar. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] Please read the Charter regarding "traffic comments" [/edit]

[Webwork]

Most parking companies track referrer traffic, which should give some indication about the source or stimulus.

Sudden spikes can happen for legitimate reasons, such as a misquote in the mainstream media. FactCheck.com/.org was a classic example. It's the .Org but a government official made a statement indicating it was a .Com domain.

It would be wise to sound the alarm but chances are alarms are already sounding.

[dakuma]

Thanks for the reply Webwork, I've sent off a quick email my affiliate just to give them the heads up, but as you say I'm sure they monitor everything very closely.

I am more worried about them thinking that I may have had some part in the questionable traffic, considering this is the second time for me. But hey, I'm innocent so I guess I shouldn't worry too much, and they did post the earning for the traffic and all of the clicks as well so, sweet, maybe it was just my lucky day :)

[Insomniak]

I purchased some geo names a few months ago and soon after parking they all had a huge traffic surge for a day, the click rate was also an amazing 50%. At first I thought I had picked some amazing names but the traffic soon disappeared. The traffic seemed legit in that the larger geo areas had more traffic then the small ones and a bot would not have differentiated this. My theory is google gives new sites a few hours of fame before sending them to purgatory.