Proxy bots

Problems with illegal hits!

[dalaz]

Has anyone noticed a problem with illegal hits to their website. Basically, I have noticed that a lot of my hits 10-155 are illegals or cheaters playing goto, etc.
Case in point:
(url removed as it went 404)
brought me 50 unique hits in 12 hours?!?!?
AOL Netscape, Lycos, AV, and GOTO didnt bring me that many hits combined.
I confronted goto with this a while back and they brushed me off, or had no idea what I was talking about.
But if you think about it, this could mean that their earning reports, etc are off by 10-15%. And that would hurt them as well!

I figured as a community we could apply some pressure and force them to do something.

Now, my corp is thinking about building an anti-cheat devise for anyone with an affiliate, because GOTO can care less.

Anyway, has anyone else had a similar experience.
regards,
dalaz

[tedster]

I'm really surprised to hear your report. My experience has been that GoTo is well aware that spurious clicks are a threat to their success, and not just a problem for the site which is the direct victim.

Here's a previous thread [webmasterworld.com] which includes some email from GoTo customer services.

It's clearly essential that GoTo and other PPC engines have effective safeguards against spurious clicks. Their very existence depends on it.

[dalaz]

Dear Tedster!
I completely disagree. I spoke with 7 different reps and no one knew what a proxy bot even was. I was told by some that it was a billing issue, or a customer service issue, but the bottom line is that cheaters are stealing money left and right and goto hasn't even spent the time to train their staff on what's going on!
i really think 10-15% is a HUGE amount--not a nominal amount.
But I do agree that their business depends on it, thats why its so suprising that they are ignoring this major problem with their service.
I'd love to hear more people respond, because now I know that my company must develop a proxy-bot guard to defend against these idiots who are stealing our money.
Sorry ted about the ranting and raving, its not personal, i'm just upset!
:)

[backus]

Dalaz, I understand completely. Another problem are hackers. If a thief can be in your house in 5 seconds, then a hacker can be in a domain in the same time. Although people say that there's protection against that, there's still never enough. One day someone will cause something in Goto which nobody can explain, and you'll be the one paying for it. It's unfortunate, yet true.

[seoboy]

the potential for this abuse is well known. the technology to do it is out there. like hackers, it will always be a threat.

on the whole i agree with tedster. i've checked logs in the past and compared "total" clicks with "billed" clicks, and its obvious that GoTo is throwing out click and not charging us for them.

that said, i've still seen potential abuse in the form of "strange" URLs like the one you mention, generating repeat traffic. but often, upon further exploration, these URLs are often believable. sometimes the keyword will be X and the site will www.X.com, offering a list of links from GoTo related to X. if www.X.com ranks high in many other search engines, its possible that it will get a decent amount of traffic, and pass some of that on to you.

re: the security device you mention, probably not a bad idea. best bet would be to figure a way to seperate out all questionable clicks, so that you could review these on your own, and perhaps turn them over to GoTo for their own review. if you clearly identify abuse from a partner or affiliate, they will promptly take action to shut that affiliate down. as tedster says, its crucial to their credibility.

seoboy

[oLeon]

Does anyone know whether Findwhat does the same (filtering out)? We got an invoice with three times more clicks as we can see in our logs.