Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been noticing for the past 6 weeks or so, traffic being directed to a specific page of one of my web sites, from different user IP address but no referring Link indicated... like it's popping in from thin air.
What's even stranger, is almost all of this traffic has the javascript in their browser disabled. It's NOT a click attact because these visitors never click on any adsense ads... and they never stay on the site long... just a second and they are gone.
After watching this traffic for weeks (about 60 per day average), I stripped the adsense code out of the particular page the traffic was targeting, even though they didn't seem to be commiting click fraud... I thought they might be doing something to negatively effect my earnings by inflating my page impressions without clicking on any ads.
So it seems that about 2 weeks afterwards, whoever the EVIL perpetrator is must have noticed, and began to target a different page on a different web site (this time my "main" site so it concerns me more).
It's almost seems like someone has created one of those "free web traffic" clubs to specifically increase page impressions on sites using adsense. If so, I wonder what such systemic impression inflation would have on the entire adsense network in general, not just my web site.
Could it be adword advertisers tring to keep their ad costs down by artificially inflating page impressions, if that is possible? I don't know why anyone else would go through such efforts? Thoughts anyone? Has anyone else notice such mystery traffic the past month or two?
You wouldn't believe the nonsense I see on my site. There's no getting to the bottom of why bots behave the way they do. I've had the same IP address try to download hundreds of pages using Wget every day for a couple of months now. The only problem is that Wget is banned in the .htaccess file and it generates hundreds of 403 errors every time.
Also, the traffic does cause page impressions on my site, as I use 2 different tracking systems... BOTH utilize javascript, and I can see the traffic... So I would think that Google's javascript would also be picking up the impressions. Granted it's only about 60 a day, I wouldn't think that would be enough to cause any earnings decline... but I'm also wary that all of a sudden the might start clicking... In fact I did see that traffic clic once... maybe twice... but that wasn't too much to worry about. BUT it also indicates that it isn't a rogue bot, I don't think.
But if it's just a rogue bot, you are correct, it wouldn't be any worry. I'll just keep an eye and watch for anthing more worrisome... but at least I'm on record in case something does go wrong and Google doesn't like it. I can plead, :but I TRIED to take precautions but we thought it was a harmless rogue bot!"
I think Google is good about that, if you make an effort to protect things, I found that hey are usually understand.
BUT I can't capture any information about the referring IP or URL... not even a "referrer blocked" message.
[webmasterworld.com...]
But once again... I'm getting much more traffic to that page than just the inktomi search bot.
That would make sense in that the 60 or so inflated impressions that I receive on those pages won't make too much of a negative difference to my earnings, I don't think.
But, if this is indeed an organized activity and not just a rogue bot, this may have a negative impact upon the advertisers ad campaigns if page/ad impressions are being artifically inflated on many other web sites with similar topics & the same advertisers' ads.
Just for the sake of discussion, let's say this is indeed the situation. While initially it may decrease the amount the advertisers pay for each click... if the page impressions seriously diminshed the apparent clickthough rate for the particular ads, these advertisers might eventually have these particular ad campaigns rejected or deletd by Google AdWords for being ineffective.... And be replaced by their competitor's ads at a cheaper rate, no doubt...
Hmmmmmm... pretty sneaky if THAT is truly what I am witnessing going on bumpski. BUT I wouldn't put it beyond the thoughts & capabilities of some desperate business people... My niche - telecommunications (in general) has been notoriously competitive, and has resulted in some of the biggest stock/accounting fraud scandals in history.
Some in the industry may not have learned "the lesson."
5 minutes in your access log and this would no longer be a mystery and you would know the referring source of this traffic and could check it out.
Download the access_log file and use grep to locate these page accesses:
grep -i "pagename.html" > inflated.txt
Then just look at inflated.txt to see where it's coming from, easy enough.
If you don't like the source, you can bounce all referrers from that domain.
