I'm on a mission.... IAEA.org

how are they driving referrals?

[skiguide]

i posted this on the SEF forums as well:

for several months now, I have seen minimal referrals from this domain to a couple of client sites in totally unrelated industries.
IAEA - International Atomic Energy Agency

Now, this week at About.com, many of the guides are reporting between 25-50 referrals from them, again, all in unrelated topics.

My theory is that they are using some sort of hidden link farm..but i don't want this to negatively affect any of the sites i am connected with. I suspect the referrals are only spiders following the links.

Has anyone come across this or have evidence of it? I'm absolutely considering emailing the Agency but i don't know what to say.

[mivox]

I've also gotten a number of referrals from them... usually less than 5 per week, but like you I have no idea why.

Please be sure to post anything you find out!

[littleman]

It is a fake referral. Someone is using proxies and scavenging your pages with that referrer. I believe they are probably using IDEA to watch who is buzzing about them publicly. There is a good chance they are scanning the forums and trying to link nics with pages from their crawls.

Anyway it is a rouge bot (probably templates stealing) and bogus traffic.

[pshea]

I've got this as well, but, littleman, sorry for being so stupid, but why would someone do this?

[toolman]

This has been hitting me for 2 years...long before I showed up here.

I think it's a spider for some type of government op. Whose government I don't know.

[skiguide]

>>>some type of government op. Whose government I don't know

Conspiracy Theorists Unite!

:)

[littleman]

[webmasterworld.com...]
Here is a related thread. I just can't see a Gov. agency using random proxies and dial ups to scavenge the web with such a attention getting referrer. The bot may not be seo related, but it just feels like it's a thief if some kind. The IAEA.org referrer is perfect for buzz tracking. They were coming at me from my Excite listings which made me think it might be an seo ripping bot.