Bay9 - Fraudulent Clicks?

[rawhide]

I have around 50 websites listed with Bay9.com. Traffic counts on sites that I have listed were moderate up until the 5th of January when traffic dramatically increased. Before the 5th around 75-85% of the click-thrus had a referral tag in my log files. Since the boom in traffic on the 5th only around 25% of the clicks brought back a referral tag which leads me to beleive Bay9 is involved in some fishy activity.

Is anyone else out there having this problem? I'm not qualified to say exactly why there is no referral tag. If anyone has any ideas on what is happening please inform.

[oilman]

welcome to WMW rawhide.

If I understand you correctly you are saying that the bulk of you visitors don't seem to be coming from anywhere - you have a bunch of log files that say 'no referrer'.

Basically you get a 'no referrer' when someone types your URL in directly, follows a link in an email or has bookmarked you site.

Is there a chance that you were listed in a newsletter or magazine article or something on the 5th?

[rawhide]

I represent 50 clients, all with URLS that we have created to redirect to the clients site.

It is very unlikely that people type music-3.com/bay9_index.html into a browser.

On the 4th of January we received 216 clicks(total 50 clients), 135 of which had referral tags.

On the 5th we received 492 clicks, 131 of which had referral tags.

On the 9th we received 1453 clicks, 287 of which had referral tags.

See a pattern?

Most of the increased traffic is from words like "shopping" and "gifts".

I'm wondering if an affiliate of Bay9 has written some sort of script to click on bay9 results in order to make themselves some cash.

[msgraph]

Not familiar with Bay9.com but check theuser agents for AOL installed on their browsers. AOL users using AOL search will not return any referring information because of their proxy servers. Are your sites listed in AOL Search?

[Mike_Mackin]

Don't know about referral tag.
Check with their CS

What I do know is that they rotate SELECTED KWs on to their Front Page and you get a SPIKE in traffic.

They don't tend to SELECT the cheap words either.