Huge increased in Overture hits? No PPC campaign!

why do i see so many hits from overture without campaign running

[followgreg]

Hi,

I am looking into my log files now and for now a couple of weeks I find a huge (compared to other engines) amount of traffic from overture.

The thing is : I DO NOT RUN ANY PPC CAMPAIGN :-O

How is that possible? more hits from Overture search engine than from Google or MSN? I'm not even ranked for important KW on overture.

I heard of some hijacked redirect links that could do that but im not sure what it is.

Can someone help me figure out what it is about?

Thanks.

[nmattheij]

Did you check the IP's the visits come from, or did you try to reproduce some visits yourself?

We had some insane PPC traffic from Google a few months ago. Turned out to come from the same few IP's. It was either a failed ddos-attack or maybe somebody wanted us to make extra costs or something. Google was aware of this and didn't charge us for these visits.

[cgrantski]

We experienced a big jump in visits from Overture also. But at the same time, we suddenly appeared ranked very well on Overture's organic listings, as opposed to being nowhere at all for many months. Our organic ranks improved on Yahoo at the same time, but not nearly as much. I didn't realize anybody at all actually used Overture itself as a search engine. I'm still not convinced, and I wonder if Overture is appearing as the referrer when traffic is actually coming from or through Overture affiliates and OEMs. I haven't actually checked this out by looking closely at the referrer string (which can contain a ton more information than is reported by log analyzers) or the IPs of visitors. Just a speculation.

[followgreg]

Actually since Yahoo, after the latest update (one week after the Big "good" update) dropped my site's homepage (yes only the homepage, for no reason and it is ridiculous since replaced by spam sites again)i'm nowhere to be found on OV either.

I just don't get it, and my log files just say Overture.com ...I will check it again but it is weird...Overture bringing more traffic than MSN or Yahoo, hard to believe.

[cgrantski]

if you find anything interesting when you check again, hope you post it here.