Traffic hijacking

Drop in sales

[michaelh]

Our site is high on the first page of Google and has been for some time. All of a sudden sales have plummeted. We have past customers who are calling and complaining that there are pop-ops occurring when they go to Google to find us.

When Google recently re indexed our orders shot back up and then a day later the sales fell. Our site logs show same or even a little increase in traffic.

Someone is stealing traffic. Any ideas how to stop this?

I really appreciate your help!

Michael

[Michael Anthony]

I think I know what's happenening. If you run a pop up campaign such as gator then you supply them with a "wishlist" of sites you want to target. I have seen some wishlists where the target is the URL that results from a search for either a company or just some big money keywords. For example, [google.com...]

However, as Gator and their types will point out to you, the users have opted in to receiving the pop ups when downloading Kazaa or something similar. Therefore the ads are being served at a user level and not over the whole web, which makes it legal and I doubt there's anything that you can do about it.

Unless, of course, you choose to fight fire with fire and aim some popups at their sites. I know that ethically two wrongs don't make a right but in my own experience I don't think that there's much else you can do.

[Shannon Moore]

I think this is related, but I don't have personal experience doing it myself. The folks in the Amazon affiliate forums frequently mention various Javascript or server-based routines to detect common parasites and display a note to users who show as infected. I presume it's to help educate the masses, but it is an uphill battle. Most folks have no clue what's hitching a ride in their OS, or if they sense "something's not quite right," they're not sure how to fix it.

It's so bad, even I (who likes to think she's relatively aware of such things) discovered some parasites and hijacking going on in my personal computer that AdAware hadn't detected...thanks to the folks here, I installed "HijackThis" and "SpyBot". And that's with a router and firewall installed on my connection.