Oy, its finally my turn to 'complain'

adsense impressions 5 times higher today

[rfung]

I just checked my adsense stats and right now at 9AM PST its 5 times higher than its usual impressions, with money being 3 times higher. I can only imagine what's it gonna be by the end of the day. 15 times more traffic with 10 times more money? (part of me is smiling at that one:))

Anyone ever experience such huge spikes being legit? my indexed pages on google are still the same, and I can't imagine my site having being picked up in any major news outlet or whatnot to justify the spike.

Just wondering if I'm being victim of click fraud spam.

[ncw164x]

if you are not sure on why your site has got this spike in traffic contact the adsense team and get them to check out your site, I had the same last month and got a reply within a few hours that everything was OK

Always better to be safe than sorry

[JohnKelly]

Congrats on the higher traffic. Your web stats should tell you where the traffic is coming from.

[rsn2k]

I am not experiencing relatively high impressions or clicks but I am experiencing very high eCPM and earnings today.

Would you recommend contacting Google about this? I think I shall wait until the end of the Adsense day and see how things look then.

[bose]

Have you looked at your log files? You are most likely to get a better idea of what is going on in there.

If you notice abnormal click patterns or unsual spikes from traffic sources (overseas traffic, cluster of closely related IPs, proxies, etc.) that look suspect, consider blocking those addresses out (in your .htaccess or httpd.conf), and notifying Adsense support.

Hopefully its nothing bad, just a case of your sites gaining some genuinely new-found popularity.

[rfung]

I went and checked my logs and 45% of the traffic is being referred as follows:

1 66.249.66.239 1,384 45.1 20 3.7

The referrer report also says that the 'top referer' is my own site. So it really seems like im being attacked by a competitor?

I've never had to deal with this type of thing before, so I emailed google to check out whatever it is they check out, because it is smelling fishy.

BTW, what is the best email to contact adsense? I just went to their 'contact us' page, searched for 'invalid clicks' and it gave a couple of possible q&a, as well as a form to fill out, which is what i did.

a breakdown by hour:

(added)
12:00 AM 456 1.6 186 0.9
1:00 AM 638 2.3 388 1.9
2:00 AM 434 1.6 172 0.8
3:00 AM 495 1.8 265 1.3
4:00 AM 540 1.9 277 1.4
5:00 AM 374 1.3 277 1.4
6:00 AM 357 1.3 250 1.2
7:00 AM 336 1.2 226 1.1
8:00 AM 1,305 4.7 572 2.8
9:00 AM 2,984 10.8 1,362 6.7
10:00 AM 4,394 15.8 2,050 10.1
11:00 AM 6,291 22.7 2,890 14.2
12:00 PM 5,716 20.6 3,458 17.0
1:00 PM 1,420 5.1 2,817 13.8
2:00 PM 762 2.7 2,322 11.4
3:00 PM 850 3.1 2,070 10.2
4:00 PM 399 1.4 791 3.9

doesn't look good to me. Last wednesday I had a pretty even 500 impressions per hour...

[bose]

I went and checked my logs and 45% of the traffic is being referred as follows:

1 66.249.66.239 1,384 45.1 20 3.7

The referrer report also says that the 'top referer' is my own site. So it really seems like im being attacked by a competitor?

Are you already competing with Google, heh ;)

It is a google IP, relax! DNS lookup shows the following:
239.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa PTR crawl-66-249-66-239.googlebot.com

BTW, what is the best email to contact adsense? I just went to their 'contact us' page, searched for 'invalid clicks' and it gave a couple of possible q&a, as well as a form to fill out, which is what i did.

Thats it! I can almost see Adsense support interrogationg one of their Bots this afternoon. Bad Bot, Bad Bot!

[rfung]

i reckon i should be looking at the second higher IP then :)ç

unfortunately since I'm travelling I have had very limited internet ability - mostly from the school I'm at, so I can download my logs to my laptop for further analysis.

Either way I notified google and we'll see what happens.

[twist]

There is this website I visit where this guy collects links from cool places he finds on the internet and posts them in a blog style. I would say he gets 10,000+ visitors a day easy. He has all links open up in a new window. Which means the websites he's sending people to aren't getting a referrer (i think thats how it works).

Anyway, a lot of the time the websites he links to will have messages like, "We are getting hammered today" or "traffic limit exceeded" and the webmasters seem to have no idea where the traffic influx is coming from.

[leadegroot]

no, twist, opening a link in a new window doesn't remove the referrer string.
A missing referrer string is most commonly from 1) bad guys or 2) a product like Norton that (sometimes) clears the referrer in the browser

[bts111]

I have had this happen to me before on a massive scale.

Contact Google and let them know what it going on.

The communication could save your account ;)