How to detect Pay-to-surf, Pay-to-click, Traffic exchange?

[yolkman]

Are you aware that your competitors may use Pay-to-surf, Pay-to-click, Traffic exchange to get you booted out?

Is there anyway to prevent from such abuses? I am referring to millions of daily impressions. Investigating on your logs is an impossible task to do.

[dataguy]

Very good question. I have a lot of user-generated content on my sites, and there are some rewards for those who have their content viewed the most, so we do occasionally find traffic from traffic exchanges and such. (Despite this being prohibited from our TOS policy.)

We constantly manually review all referrals that come from sources other than the major SE's. It is time consuming, but I don't know of another way and I think it is worth it.

[yolkman]

That wont work in my case. I have millions of daily traffic on my game & sport site.

[jomaxx]

Investigating on your logs is an impossible task to do.

I don't know what this means in your context, but looking at common referring pages is one of the most important things for any webmaster to do.

[dataguy]

I have millions of daily traffic

Yeah, so do I. Like I said, I think it's important.

We don't look at the raw logs, we store referral info in a database so that we can sort/filter/quantify the data, but it's still a manual process.

[argv1900]

what do you do when you found out that someone is using traffic exchange to view your site?

How do you ban the referal?

[Tearabite]

what exactly do you look for in the logs? repeating non-SE traffic? (not counting links to your site from forum posts, etc )?

[jomaxx]

Look at the referrer field, that's the most important. I don't do this every day, but I certainly take a look if traffic is notably higher/lower than expectations.

argv1900: You can ban referrals from any website via the .htaccess file, using the HTTP_REFERER field. I've only ever heard of people actually doing this in order to prevent the hotlinking of images, but in theory you can also prevent surfers from any website from accessing your regular pages.

[argv1900]

jomaxx : Thank's a lot for the tips.