There's a funny/cruel thing I've noticed; when I look at my google analytics it's telling me some of my sites are up 25% - 45% visits percent change from the previous month! (Woohoo!)
I also noticed that for about 3-4 weeks. First started with my stats showing referral traffic from a site in Taiwan. I visited the site but didn't find a link to my site. I didn't think much of it at first. Thought that it was just normal referral spam and they would just die off. But then, the 'traffic' started to reach really crazy levels. I was hitting nearly 50% higher than my normal figures. Problem was, somehow this traffic was also adding up my ad impressions. I figured enough was enough. Did some more digging :
- The sites (all 8 subdomains and the main site) suddenly were not accessible, but my stats were still registering hits from them.
- The 'traffic' from those sites were only landing on my homepage - nowhere else.
- Analytics showed the huge amount of hits translated into ZERO Adsense earnings. Somehow, this 'traffic' was registering ad impressions and burying my CTR and eCPM.
So I decided to ban the whole bunch of IP addresses. The past 3 days, numbers have tapered to normal, CTR and eCPM has gone back to normal.
Gotta keep an eye on the logs for a while to make sure this 'traffic' doesn't come back.
Me thinks you should do the same. Your spike in 'traffic' may be useless spam.
