Sudden Increase

very very very high earnings

[steven mheakyle]

24 hours ago i emailed google that i will be transfering servers and i will experience downtimes.

9am (+8GMT) i check my adsense i saw some impression around a thousand and a single digit clicks and earning of single digit dollars.

3pm (+8GMT) i recheck my adsense i was astonished to what i saw an abrupt raise of stats

Page Impression : double (the 9am)
Clicks : abc (becomes three digits) i used to have less than 30 clicks since FEB.
Click Rate : y.u % (for the entire adsense i never break 1.0%)
CPM : USD gh.j
Earnings : USD qwe.rt (i use to ave. two digits but didnt reach USD50)

5pm (+8GMT) i again check again the higher it climb!

Page Impression : triple (the 9am)
Clicks : 3xx (increase more!) i used to have less than 30 clicks since FEB.
Click Rate : p.y % (for the entire adsense i never break 1.0%)
CPM : USD gh.j
Earnings : USD bnm.jk (increased more) (i use to ave. two digits but didnt reach USD50)

i emailed google ASAP i sent 2 mails around 3:00PM (+8GMT) and 1 mail few minutes ago asking whats wrong with my account!

anybody knows whats wrong? and what are the possible reasons why this happen and possible solutions?

thank you!

[Dan_Norder]

Why did you email Google to tell them that you were switching servers? Why would they care?

Did you change hosting companies? Piss off the old one? Is the old one maybe clicking your site like the beejuses to try to get you in trouble with Google?

ARe you using some automated page transfer script that's not too bright and follows all links on the page, including Google ad links?

[steven mheakyle]

hello dan,

yes i did change hosting company due to the increase of hosting fee so i went to a cheaper one. no i dont have such scripts installed in my webpages. i been to adsense since FEB. and my earnings are stable same AVERAGE but today having problems (abrupt icrease of CLICKS) worried me much. imagine from a daily two digit average of clicks i get today is the highest 300+ and the impression is normal. today the highest earnings/day i got almost reached 200

anybody help me with this problem or is this normal (well the abrupt increase of clicks bothers me most)

[loanuniverse]

Unless you have the adsense tracking script, you will not be able to tell who clicked what. Therefore, take a look at the data that you have access to {your server logs}for clues.

Personally, I would not worry much. I had considerably more clicks for the last couple of days {twice the average}and about 30% more traffic, but I know is because I rank highly for a finance term that becomes popular every time the Federal Reserve plays with the interest rates. It could be you got a lot of referrals from a link or that you are suddendly ranking for some good keywords.

[steven mheakyle]

the sad thing i dont have the tracking script. i dig the raw logs i extract every request for today but i didnt notice any abnormal things! (i dont know which ip clicks the ads most) only visits and referrals

[Alleks]

Steven,

Looks like simple traffic boost to your site. Wait for 3 days and then try to analyze what happened.
Anyway, more money it's not a problem.

[steven mheakyle]

i check my logs the 3xx number of clicks raised to 4xx its worrying me more! i wonder which IP click most!

[rezash]

Did you have a notfound page file on your old site with ADsense in it? Maybe some visitors are sent to your old site and they see notfound page with Adsense ad on it! if thats the case DNS propagation takes 1-3 days and after that it be normal again.

[steven mheakyle]

the case is i have this foo.com and nsX.server1.com and nsX.server2.com some visitors sometimes go to nsX.server1.com or nsX.server2.com and other gots 304 and others 200

i download both logs but still no abnormal logs happened.

traffic booost! well my site is well traffic but it converts low due to i have less pages. but today its different i got lots of clicks same impressions!

[steven mheakyle]

i found this new thing that always access my main page

216.209.27.82 - - [12/Aug/2004:22:19:03 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 17255 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M; TheFreeDictionary.com)"
216.209.27.82 - - [12/Aug/2004:22:19:03 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 17255 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M; TheFreeDictionary.com)"
216.209.27.82 - - [12/Aug/2004:22:19:05 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 17255 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M; TheFreeDictionary.com)"
216.209.27.82 - - [12/Aug/2004:22:19:05 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 17255 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M; TheFreeDictionary.com)"
216.209.27.82 - - [12/Aug/2004:22:19:06 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 17255 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M; TheFreeDictionary.com)"

i got more of this things always access my pages!

[steven mheakyle]

not only robots smashing my site!

i believe somebody is making fun of my site and plan to boot me out!

a part of the long logs:

80.130.89.179 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:49:17 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 25711 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113"
80.130.89.179 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:49:18 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 25711 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113"
80.130.89.179 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:49:18 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 25711 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113"
80.130.89.179 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:49:19 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 25711 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113"

a part of the long logs
81.156.42.213 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:38:28 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 27163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
81.156.42.213 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:38:29 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 27163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
81.156.42.213 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:38:29 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 27163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
81.156.42.213 - - [12/Aug/2004:23:38:30 +0800] "GET /main.html HTTP/1.1" 200 27163 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

lots lots more! anybody advice what to do? do i need to close my site as of the mean time or what? any suggestions?

[blue_eagle]

close your web site and tell google what is going on and tell them that you are not going to serve adsense ads until you fix this problem. I believe that they will appreciate that and DON't be happy for the money you are making now since it is unusal and i believe yur previous hosting is doing that.

[Palehorse]

You should use webalizer or something similar and really analyze the traffic.

It sounds like somebody is out to get you.

The honest thing to do is mentioned above, remove the adcode until you figure it out. In the mean time find out how to install run webalizer.

[steven mheakyle]

i got bunch of tracking! i saw them in my logs. now i will close my website!

the hard thing is i cant access adsense page. stops only with a white page.

i have a good track record from feb until now. today and yesterday only is the worst thing!

[steven mheakyle]

anybody could give some tips on how to prevent such things to happen?

[irock]

steven mheakyle,

Isn't it more logical to remove the google adsense code first?

[ChrisKud5]

Why don't you block this person/robot in your robots.txt or your htaccess file.

Is that log file just page accesses? Why would that have anything to do with clicks? Just because something/one visited you a ton does not mean those are where the clicks are coming from.

[steven mheakyle]

yes exactly! the problem is i dont know which ip clicked the ads

[Compworld]

Why don't you just take the ads off temporarly until you correct the issue?

CompWorld

[web_india]

yes, the best thing would be to take off the adsense code temporarily instead of closing the website

[dan_popescu]

I once had this problem and I let Google know about it. They suggested that I block the IP address generating a ton of hits, which is what I did. They weren't so concerned about it though, in other words they seemed to really trust their system and indeed many of those hits never got credited. I did make more money those few days though.

[Bluepixel]

Don't you think if somebody would want to hurt you, he wouldn't even access your pages but grab once your adsense code and execute it again and again and fake the referer?

[steven mheakyle]

"he wouldn't even access your pages but grab once your adsense code and execute it again and again and fake the referer?"

what is our(adsense publishers) protection againts this type of sabotage?

one more thing i already sent 6 emails to google still no reply! :(

[Palehorse]

Did you remove the code? Would be kinda wrong if it were still running with you knowing there is a problem and all..

[steven mheakyle]

yes! i remove all adsense codes in my webpages. but still i got 20-40 page impressions and zero (0) clicks

still no reply from google!

[a1_design]

Maybe somebody copy your add code to one's own site and try to harm you!

[steven mheakyle]

exactly somebody is attacking one of my website. and i wonder how they do it! **** clicks in one day (almost 500)

anyway... i got G reply they deducted my earning USD xxx.xx for the invalid clicks and they assured me that my account is in good standing with Google and they expect me to still continue publishing adsense.

i sent them reply. asking what is our(publishers) protection if somebody steal our adsense code and paste it in anybody else pages. which is very clear to sabotage a publisher! (wait for thier reply)

anybody could give me sometips in preventing this attack to happen again?

[Rodney]

anyway... i got G reply they deducted my earning USD ****.xx for the invalid clicks and they assured me that my account is in good standing with Google and they expect me to still continue publishing adsense.

That's good to hear such a response from Google.

Often times we hear reports of no response back from the Adsense team.

This case seems to show that things are hopefully turning around on the communications front. I guess they're listening.

[steven mheakyle]

blessings!

i send them bunch of letters and i gave them URL of my logs for that day(08/12/04).

my main justification is: i've been with adsense since FEB. and I do have a clean record.

again thank you (webmasterworld) and to everybody who participated in my thread.