Searchbrowser.com

Suspicious traffic

[1Lit]

We are receiving a phenomenal amount of traffic through searchbrowser.com links. The links themselves, via which people come to our site, are the longest I've ever seen - over 400 characters long.

I was wondering who these guys are and which PPC search engines work with them. Tried doing some research and they seem like a dodgy company.

All seems very suspicious as they don't even have a search box on their homepage.

[satanclaus]

Got them. Looks like spyware at first glance. notice their ip resolves to cdtnet.net which goes back to searchbrowser.com. Throw that into google and then look at pages containing the domain. You'll run down some of their information like that.

[1Lit]

Thank you. Kind of you to look into it for us :)

Looked in Google and they seem to show in a few site's logs.

However, am not an expert on such things. Where do you think they get their traffic from?

[satanclaus]

spyware. By installing toolbars and different types of hijacking software on surfer computers so that they're bombarded with ads they most likely do not want.

[1Lit]

Cheers mate. Really appreciate your feedback.

How can we track down which PPC search engines work with them?

[satanclaus]

I'll look into it as best I can and post the results sometime early in the week.

[satanclaus]

From doing some comparative looking I'm fairly sure I see Findwhat and Search123 results. This only took me a few minutes to figure out. They're probably dealing with the other PPCs.

I came up with this information from backtracking based on the cdnet.net domain I came to blazefind.com which is apparently their portal now. Its all the same company.

I wonder if the PPC's know that they deal with people that use spyware as a means for building traffic?

[houseofsecrets]

can you tell if any of the traffic converts? Don't hesitate to sniff around as others advise but don't sniff yourself out of a good thing.

[satanclaus]

I doubt it converts. My father has me drive 30 minutes at least once a month to remove adware off of his machine. I've personally watched him click on links about 20 times to show me and I know he's clicked on them more than that. He has never bought a thing off the Internet in his life. I believe this approach to getting clicks does nothing but devalue PPC for all of us.

[vertronics]

Searchbrowser seems to be a form of browser hijacking. I see that it changes Google's organic serps and inserts dynamic listings that contain the search pharse.

~vertronics