Incredible Phenominon

Someone else promoting my site

[kokaroach]

3 days ago, traffic to a certain page on one of my web sites went from 16-20 page views a day, to over 1600. That page has made me $500 from adsense up to this point.

The page contains a review for a popular health supplement, one I have used myself in the past with great results.

Today I discovered where that traffic was coming from. It appears someone has paid for my site to show up for that particular keyword phrase above the natural search listings in Google - not in an adwords ad at the side of the search results - right above them! My url is right there for all to see and the link leads to the product review on my site. I've never advertised there before but I understand it costs quite a bit.

The only reason I can think of for someone doing this is that their adwords ads are running on that page... but even that doesn't make sense since they could simply put up a page and send the adwords traffic directly to it.

So to whomever is paying to promote my site - thank you kindly. If I knew who you were I'd send you a cut of my adsense earnings ;-) (hmm, well maybe a thankyou card at least)

If this keeps up for the remainder of June, I'll be posting a link to a pic of me and the UPS guy in my profile here at WW!

K

[emodo]

serves me right for setting up my adwords campaign after a night on the town.. :)

When he takes your ad down, you should seriously consider paying for it to be back up again if you make more from it than it costs.

[kokaroach]

emodo, I'll be finding out more info on the ad rates for that spot tomorrow. Thanks for the tip.

K

[elsewhen]

being up at the top costs lots of $$$... what an unbelieveably fortunate mistake. i am sure that for every 1$ you are making, that advertiser is paying $5 or more!

congratulations... you just won the adsense lottery!

[bnhall]

If you use adwords then sometimes you can appear in the ad area above the natural results (instead of the adwords on the right). If you ARE using adwords, that's what it is. If you are NOT using adwords, then you got lucky!

[kokaroach]

bnhall, nope... not using adwords. I haven't since last summer and not even for that site or keyword.

K

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Is there another site with a very similar domain name that someone could have typed in by mistake? I think this may be what happened but don't book a holiday on the strength of it just yet. The people who did it are soon going to see that their ROI is zero ;)

[kokaroach]

Hi BDW,

It would have to be a very elaborate mistake. In the ad, the visible url is www.mysite.com and when clicked on it leads to www.mysite.com/category-folder/title-of-product-review.html

Someone is definitely and deliberately promoting that page via adwords.

I'm not complaining mind you ;-) but it seems illogical to me that someone would be doing this. There's a prominent link to my contact form on every page of the site as well and no one has contacted me regarding this.

K

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Which leads on the fact that perhaps Google should not be allowing people to take out ads for sites that they don't own? I know that most of us would be more than happy to accept this free advertising but there may be some people who don't want to advertise their sites (for whatever reason).

[HiCairo]

hi,
in the end you'll find a teacher/friend or someone close to you made this ad for you ;)
or at least someone who found this page too useful for him.

[exodus]

Could it be the maker of the supplement wanting to promote a good review of their product?

[creepychris]

Could it be the maker of the supplement wanting to promote a good review of their product?

I was thinking the same thing. Seems to be the only rational explanation.

[joeking]

Yes the supplement manufacturer stands to benefit from this, but on the face of it nobody else.

I have a site that is betting related. There is a site with a very similar name that embarked on a link exchange strategy. Their banners are on a lot of sites in our little betting / gambling niche. But they all link to my site because of a typo in the url!

[stuartc1]

Just yesterday I was looking through my stats and found at least 4 sites which I've had quite a few referals from of the past few days. After looking through these sites I find nothing, and the sites topics are completly different from mine.
On digging further I find about hundreds of referals from the advertising service adclick - I've never had anything to do with them.
I looks like someone has purchased advertising to my site also.... but this worries me, I'm thinking there must be some hack to this that will discredit my site or something, perhaps a new kind of attack from a competitor site.
Anyone ever heard of this?

[spaceylacie]

Could it be the maker of the supplement wanting to promote a good review of their product?

I bet this is what it is. They are evidently doing it on purpose since it points to your exact page. Awesome! Let us know how long it keeps up!

[Hanslicht]

Ask them to pay for that extra traffic they cause to your site :-)

[petra]

better yet why not create an entire site about the supplement and have them sponsor it ;)

[robsynnott]

Possibly Google's trying to get people interested in AdSense ;)