Hi, I have a site ranked rather well in the major search engines. I have noticed that I have had an increase of useless visitors coming from about 10 - 15 various sites. I have not properly looked at them all, but one that I have looked at is http://www.adsensemadeeasy.com/?affid= I seem to be having the same visitor coming to my site on a daily basis say about 2 - 4 times a day where they will come through to a certain page and then refresh that page anywhere from 5 - 30 times on every visit. To me it looks as if it is a site that is trying to gain link popularity by thinking that if they do this then their sites url will get listed in my stats and the major search engines will pick it up. Either that or they are doing this many of times to alot of people so that when people look at their stats they get curios about that site and how much visitors it has sent and then go and click on it. Sites like this really don't do me or anybody any favours. If Google Adsense looked at my stats then they would probably think that it is just me refreshing my website page time and time again just so that I can earn more from their Adsense program when getting paid on a CPM basis. I have given the owner of the site an email, but I don't think they will reply. I also now have the feeling that it could actually be one of their affiliates of the site as it has affid= at the end unless they use that for tracking theirselves just to see what sites they are getting most of their traffic from when doing this spam advertising stuff. Does anybody know what I can do to easily stop all of this.
If someone is trying to use referral spam, you won't be getting a minor number of refreshes (think massive amounts). It sounds like someone is genuinely interested on your site. But personally, I you're reading into your logs too much
Yep, I agree. Referral hits are valued highly by all SE's. Hence, why we all try to get a good anchor text happening for imbound links. Check your logs to see what the anchor text is that is hitting your site. If it's your chosen keywords, think yourself very fortunate. If it's other keywords, think yourself even more fortunate because someone else is placing a link to your site using their idea of anchor text to attract people to it. Google loves this. Start thinking outside the square my man. Art is correct. It's all good to read your logs but don't get paranoid at what you see.
I don't think I explained it properly or something. This is definately referral spam or stats spam. It is the same person coming to my site again and again and keep coming through to the EXACT same page of my site and doesn't go on any other page of my site. He/She just refreshes that page about 5 - 30 times and then leaves about 30 seconds after. They refresh quickly. They don't even look at the content or read it. They are refreshing the same page every 0 - 2 seconds. The person is coming to my site on a daily basis and sometimes up to 5 times a day doing this. He/She comes through to the exact same page every time and just refreshes that exact same page every second or two constantly for about 5 - 30 times and then leaves. No this is definately not a proper visitor that is genuinly interested in my site. I have not found this out by my logs. I have found this out by doing a search engine my stats for that site as I had noticed it in my Awstats. Once I had noticed that I then done a search on my stats that I had personally built and found that they are coming time and time again. My stats tracks the IP, Country, Referral URL, Time of Visitor, What pages they had visited, How many pages they had visited on my site, How long they were on each page, etc.
Also, I nearly forgot to mention that the url that I mentioned in my first post is where the visitor is coming through to my site. So that means that they must have clicked on a link from that page and when I look at the that site in question my site is nowhere to be found.
Sounds like referal spam to me, do you publish your logs at all? Is so make sure you use 'nofollow' tags or even better don't publish them at all! Can you block this specific visitor/bot by IP banning him?
I could, but within my stats he seems to have used something like 4 or 5 different spanish ip's so far which is nearly identical in that a few numbers change near the end. I guess that he must be using boardband or something and then he resets it every so often. So I could ban him for probably a few days and then he may return with a different ip. Also, I notice that I am seeing a few similar things on a few other sites that I am getting traffic from. I also don't publish my stats or logs anywhere. They also should not be able to be seen by the search engines as I keep them sort of things private.
To be honest he's probably doing it automatically to a huge list of sites so wouldn't even notice if he was rejected from yours.
I know he is probably doing it to alot, but how can I block sites like these. I have looked at my personally created stats where they are organized by date received and it looks as if his Spanish IP is changing every few days. I know it is the same person because the IP is similar and the page that he is starting on is the exact same and he is refreshing roughly the same amount of times at the same speed every time.
Check out WMW, there's some threads there that should help with bots hitting your site, a program or two over there that automatically blocks bots to your site. You are correct though, if you start getting rankings, you start getting scraped all over the place. You also start getting links though. I don't think they help much, but they might help a little. Or you can just do what I do and not care about the scraping and bots. If they're not wholesale publishing my content, what do I care? It's a computer after all, it's not any more work or cost for me to serve more visitors. (assuming you're not getting your server overloaded or hitting cost barriers).
I probably can, but I wouldn't want to just incase there are other potential visitors that use some of them ips that I ban. I have not checked WMW out, but I definately know one thing is that the site that I menioned in the first post that is doing it is doing it through the use of a browser. I have made my stats so that it only shows visitors that actually use a browser. If they don't use a browser like all or most robots don't then it doesn't track them or show them. This site is showing clearly in my stats, so they are doing it through a browser in some way or another.
Not neccessarily (in fact, quite likely not). It's dead simple to mask a robot as a coming from a browser, it's a simple variable that's passed to the webserver. Set it in the robot, and you think it's coming from a browser. If it's a robot/scraper and it is masking itself this way, it is almost certainly not good and should be banned. It's using stealth techniques for a reason. 'good' bots announce themselves as actual bots and don't mask themselves that way.
The WMW stuff I'm talking about is I think in the php and perl area. there's some extended threads there with some programs that will check for stuff like this - if a visitor hits the page so many times in a defined period of time they'll start getting 404's.
Sh*T!!! I emailed this person about it 4 hours ago and told them could they stop sending this fake traffic. I have now checked my Adsense account and for that site which I mentioned to him that is getting the traffic it is now getting bomb by clicks on Adsense. He or someone else is bombing my Adsense account with clicks from the site that I mentioned to him that he was sending the clicks to. I think it is time to get emailing Google quickly!
You're right, email Google and explain the situation to them. I'd also remove AS off that site for the time being.
I am not removing Adsense of that site until I get further stats. When I say it is getting bombed, I should really be saying that my CTR is about just over double to what it normally is for that site. So I will wait a little longer and see if my CTR will lower again and get back on average. If it doesn't then I will look at taking the ads of and things. But anyway, I have contact Google about it just incase they are fraudulant clicks.
I don't know if it is him though, It could be anybody, it could even be someone from this forums all I know. I am not 100% sure if it is click bombing yet, but I emailed Google just incase. It could have been that I had just got a few people that was interested in the ads that all clicked on them roughly together or something. My CTR is starting to go down a little now, but is still above average.