Traffic spike - need help in figuring it out

[mayday88]

Hi:

I have a classified ads website for equipment and have experienced a significant spike in my site's traffic over the past month or so. My sitemeter shows that it is from the domain name of airtelbroadband.in (India). They visit often, visit 199 or 200 pages at a time, and from several different IP addresses (canada, US, Uruguay). A quick RBL check shows them all blacklisted on blacklist.spambag.org. I contacted my hosting company and they tell me that my site has not been hacked.

Why are these IP addresses visiting my website?

Thx-
Stephen

[tangor]

Stripping/scraping your site content to later appear on theirs... I'd deny such behavior via IP or hostname in .htaccess

[mayday88]

Thanks.
how would I do that?

[tangor]

Are you running your own site, or is it hosted on another? Can't really mention names here, but do tell us how your site is set up... need that info before offering any answers.

If you are on shared hosting under Linux/Apache, you'll need access to .htaccess to set up any kind of ip bans. If under MS I can't help much there, but you can also address ip bans there as well.

[mayday88]

Thank you. Shared hosting (VPS) - Linux

[tangor]

Take at look at the Apache Web Server forum ... the library has a great deal of information regarding .htaccess. [webmasterworld.com...]

[mayday88]

Will do - Thank you!

[Jane_Doe]

I'd deny such behavior via IP or hostname in .htaccess

I have done exactly that with a similar traffic spike from a dubious site and that solved the problem. There is no need to figure out why they are doing it. It usually isn't anything good. Just ban traffic from them to your site.

[mayday88]

Thank you...

[nitity]

Thank you.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], nitity!