Are you guys getting fake hits to your directory?

Hy there, i have a question, lately analytics is showing me an increased ammount of traffic...like 3 times more, and there are some refferers that show up near the top. I went and checked their site, but couldn't find a link, so i suspect they are fake hits.

Adsense isn't picking them either, so i have the same page impressions as before in adsense, but a lot more traffic in analytics. This also makes me think they are fake hits.

So, my questions are: are you guys seeing this in your directories and what can i do to prevent this?...i was thinking of banning the urls from .htaccess, but apart from that have no idea..

Ok, waiting to hear some ideas

tx

 

This is known as referral spamming. It's not showing up as Adsense impressions, because it involves sendind fake referrer information usually without loading the page.

You could ban these referrers through .htaccess, but unless they are actually using up a lot of bandwidth it probably isn't worth your time. This is because this form of spamming usually involves sending false referrer information for many different websites at once, sometimes even hundreds. Keeping up with it would take ages, and usually by the time you get round to banning one IP or referrer string, another pops up to bother you.

There are two things that you can do to help: ensure that you don't publish any stats, or link to your stats pages. Referral spam is mainly about getting links from people's stats pages, and naive webmasters who publish live links to their referrers is the whole reason this plague arose in the first place. Secondly, tell all your webmaster friends not to publish their referrer information or link to their stats pages.

 

Note that some may well be semi automated submissions, using submission software.

I wouldn't ban them cos, perhaps one day they'll be paying clients

Secondly, banning iPs , is common, but IMHO, a big mistake
because a lot of people , infact most people are on dynamic IPs

The "spammer" IP you ban today, might well be the SEO mass paid listing submitter of tomorrow, now that might hurt

 

Well, i disagree with you on both points no ofence intended

1.No, if they would be automated/semiautomated submission the page would load and if would be counted by adsense, so it's not this, the thing with fake hits, as was pointed out earlyer it's that in most cases it doesn't load the page, that's why adsense doesn't see them .

2. I am not talking about ip bannning, i am talking about domain banning...once a spammer it'a a high posibility it will be a spammer for good, so banning would be a good thing....unfortunately it involves a little too much work

 

Interesting. Could you explain a little more on referral spamming?

 

There is actually software out there that does this. I'm not going to publicise it by naming it, but this has been going on for a long time. It just sends out fake referrer headers to websites, in order to promote the website in question and gain backlinks. There's really not a lot to be done to prevent it these bots from visiting, but you can at least ensure that you warn other people, and don't let them obtain links from your pages.

 

I noticed, that some webmasters are trying to get on the "Top Links" page, by hitting F5 or visiting their details page with proxy. Another thing are scraper bots that crawl my directories.

 

No, I naver noticed fake hits.
But its a good idea with the fake hits to get listed on the "Top Links" pgae

 

Yes, I am getting A LOT of fake traffic and submissions. They even seem to get past paying for featured listings for free...dunno how. (Using phpLD)