Forum Moderators: martinibuster
About 3 days go I started getting a lot of traffic to the site. I’m not sure exactly where the traffic is coming from but based on the not so advanced stats system on my server I see some of the particulars and I’m a little skeptical and worry about loosing my adsense account.
My hits went from 200 a day to:
Sunday = 1,300
Monday= 3,600
Tuesday ( 5 hours into the day) = 2,200
This site is very niche and I would think even if I had top placement on all the search engines I wouldn’t be able to get that kind of traffic.. So here are some idea’s I’m shooting out and maybe somebody can tell me if something looks fishy.
1. An affiliate decided to join and promote the product I sell on the site and had a very large mailing list witch I think was responsible for most of the 1,300 hits on Sunday; my logs show a lot of clicks from email boxes on that day.
2. On Monday I couldn’t see to many email clicks to the site from the affiliate’s mailing list, but the traffic went to 3,600.
3. Today looks like it will easily break yesterday’s traffic and although I am getting some sales for the product, I am getting very good numbers from adsense and it’s scaring me because it’s like 40 times the earnings I was getting before and looks like it will be 100 times after today is done.
I seem to have gotten very good placemen in MSN in the last few days and notice a lot of keyword visitors coming from the same key word, witch to me doesn’t seem like it would be so popular. I don’t know all the tricks people can pull so I’m wondering if I’m missing something here. The usage logs show some, but not many SURF FOR CASH type sites, witch I have never had anything to do with. Maybe 200 or so hits for 1 of those programs. Is it possible somebody signed me up for one of those programs and is sending all this traffic to my site and there click my ads?
Anyway I have been getting increased sales for the product I sell so the traffic seems somewhat targeted, but I just can’t believe the site could make such a huge leap. Yahoo and Google don’t even send traffic to it yet, but it is on top of MSN for primary keywords.
I sent a message to adsese after the first day my traffic shot up but no response yet. I’m very new to adsense and earn very little until now. My worry is not about the money I’m making , but loosing my adsense account because some ding dong competitor wants to sabotage me. I’m not up to any games and haven’t clicked or asked anybody to click my ads. None of my friends or family know about this site.
Any advice would be appreciated; I’m worried that because I’m a new and small time adsense publisher they will kick me out at the first sign of what they think is fraud.
If ASA would let me contact him that would be great, I didn’t get a response last time I stickied him about another issue, so I will just hope adsense support gets back to me.
Thanks
I don't usually tell people to worry, but if your stats are this far out of whack with no good explanation then you might consider removing AdSense temporarily and emailing Google with a heads-up.
I guess this shows the risks of running AdSense on a site with an affiliate program. You end up being responsible for your own traffic quality as well as that of all your affiliates. Of course, IMO it's questionable to have revenue sources that enable you to monetize traffic without paying any commission to affiliates anyway.
Check the referrers and see if there are any common ones and investigate them. It could just be that your site got plugged on a very popular site (i.e. digg).
I do not think AdSense would mind if they can see where the referrers are coming from and deem it legit.
I had a feeling somebody would say something about adsense on an affiliate site. All i can say is the page affilates send there traffic to has no leaks at all and the adsense is not on or link to from the landing page. That is pretty fair. There are a lot worse things i could do to cheat affiliates. affiliates that generate sales are not stupid and thats why i have several good affiliates..
I'm a bit ignorant as to how to track if hits are legit or not. I use statcounter javascript on my pages and those look legit. msn.search.keyword.
My weblizer stats show a lot of hits from MSN but it only shows the top 30 referals sites. It is a dedicated server so i'm sure all my logs can be saved but i have never done anything with it so i'm not sure what it saves or covers but it seems a little limited.
but the hits are coming at like 1 hit a minute for a very nitch keyword and it's always the same keyword combination.
It could be some of your affiliates run those pay to surf type sites, so you could be getting a lot of useless impressions from people visiting your page with no interest in its content.
I don't think it's really an adsense issue, but more of an affiliate/server issue.
You may need to be more selective about what types of affiliates you allow.
It could be some of your affiliates run those pay to surf type sites, so you could be getting a lot of useless impressions from people visiting your page with no interest in its content.
I am worried about those paid to surf things but i see only 200 out of the last 5000 hits are from those sites, and they dont have there USER NUMBER attatched to the refering URL like i have seen on my other sites. The majority of hits are not going to the affiliates sales page anymore that i can tell. Most appear to be going to several pages and the majority from MSN now. For this niche i have got the best 1 and 2 possition.. I hope i'm wrong but each day the traffic is going higher and it doesn't seem possible.
My sales are still much better witch i would think would not improve if all that traffic was paid to surf. Also my clickthrew rate on the ads is normal, it's just 100 times as many clicks. I dont know if those paid to browse sites encourage there browsers to click adsense or not but that is my biggest concern. I would think the click rate on my adsense would go UP or DOWN if this fraud was happening but it's about the same.
Also the MSN traffic i get is coming up under the same keyword match for all my logs and no variations of those keywords. So i'm wondering if the paid to surf people go via MSN do a search then click threw to the site. Who knows..
I did find that my server auto backs-up my log files everyday so i can go check into this as soon as i learn how to read them..
Thanks
If your server is apache, chances are the logs are located in a directory called /var/log/httpd.
