Paid to Surf schemes. detrimental to listings, spamming the logs.

[kahuna]

Paid to Surf schemes... detrimental to listings if for example a person also had the g--gle toolbar?

I have recently had a zillion hits from example.com(url changed so they don't get the exposure).
I read you pay them and they send you "traffic."
Well... I certainly didn't pay them... and the traffic comes from China and tim-buck-two... etc etc.

Do you all think they are just spamming the logs files? and or what would their motive be for having my site listed in their pay for surfing "toolbar."

Thanks for your comments.

[edited by: Receptional at 2:17 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified the URL even more - just to be safe, legally. [/edit]

[kahuna]

oh... and we just noticed from their website this little piece of bovine scatology...
"W@nt t0 dr@m@tically incre@se y0ur webs1te tr@ff1c in 0rder t0 get @ h1gher r@nk. Th1s 1s the r1ght pl@ce f0r y0u."

So we can pretty much believe "get @ h1gher r@nk" is scam company operating from an untouchable foreign country.

[topsites]

If I am not mistaken, what this thread refers to is not referral spam per se, but Internet users are being paid (or more accurately put, made to believe they will be paid) for clicking certain links.

There are several legitimate companies offering this, but with legitimate companies the ONLY web sites get any traffic are sites whose owners requested it or did something to get it going (like signed up at said site, whatever). Yes, there ARE webmasters who will use this method to drive traffic to their site as it tends to be very cheap (well so is the traffic).

Last month, my site started catching a bunch of hits from some place like this and much like yourself, I never had anything to do with this place... I added the domain sending the hits to my .htaccess so now their users are sent to the 403 page (404 is page not found, 403 is inadequate credentials, hehehe).

This would be the best solution if you did not ask for this, this kind of traffic has a conversion rate of somewhere around 50 or 100 thousand to 1 who MAY become a regular visitor, most of the users clicking are no better than robots, mindlessly sitting at the computer while clicking every 30 seconds (for those who don't have an automated clicker, that is).

Man it's getting worse every day, I feel the next dotboom waiting around the corner... few more years of peace and it starts all over again, every single time...