hey guys, I'm relatively new to this forum. I have a niche site with adsense on it. The site is growing in daily traffic and i noticed an increase in adsense earnings : ) I seemed to notice that the quality of my traffic affects my adsense earnings greatly (which makes sense - Google wants quality traffic, not just a quality site). However there is a problem - For example, i have a WordPress site, and with my WordPress stats plugin i can see which referrers are sending traffic to my site. Given my niche and nature of my content, I naturally want to see only major search engines like google, yahoo, or bing on my list of referrers. Ofcourse, it would be ok if i see some other related sites linking to my site and refering visitors... thats all good for seo and for my site... BUT lately, I see a lot of spam sites referring traffic to me. This is not good. Although everytime i go to the spam site that said it was referring to me, i cant find any links anywhere that link to my site. I notice that spam sites and everything else besides from real people visiting my site, lowers my earnings in adsense. It basically lowers ctr and cpc which i dont want. It also makes Google think my site isnt that good in quality. Anyone having similar problems? Is there a way to block spam sites and spam traffic? Right now, all i'm doing is just making sure i have good content on my site, but the stats plugin is still recording unwanted visitors and referrers to my site.
Have you bought traffic? And aren't there any iFrames on the page? It's strange thing, but I've seen it happening before for one of my proxy sites. I just kept building links on quality pages and actually didn't worry too much about it. It would be great if someone had a solution for this though
No, i didnt buy any traffic. I want natural/organic traffic. I'm wondering if spam bots/sites just probe the web for good sites and then attack them.
Since you mentioned a wordpress stats plugin, I'm guessing you're not using Google Analytics, or at the very least you don't have your Analytics and Adsense accounts linked. When the accounts are linked, you start to get extra tabs in your Analytics reports for Adsense data. For instance you can see which browsers are generating the most revenue, which referrers are generating the most revenue, and so on. If you ever have referrers you suspect of dragging you down, it's possible to detect the referrer with Javascript and prevent ads from being displayed to visitors coming from those referrers.
No it won't. People like to assume things... I have been using various junk traffic for a long time without ever getting a warning. Many webmasters also use junk traffic to increase Alexa ratings, and not for clicking on Adsense ads. There is nothing in the Adsens TOS that says you cannot have bought traffic on your site.
ok, thanks joebert. I fear I will have to do something like that with javascript.... its just an annoying nuisance. And lol you guys, i'm NOT doing anything with purchased junk traffic! I mentioned earlier that i only have organic traffic.
If you get traffic from sites where there NO links to your site this could be referrer spam > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam
Thanks Arris. I think that sounds like the exact problem. This makes sense. Now i just need to do some research to block these pesky spammers... This article looks like it will solve the problem: lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/battling-referrer-spam/
I just wanted to point out something from that article that has stopped being entirely accurate in the 3 years since the article was published. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen traces of referrer spam in their Analytics reports in the last couple of years. Referrer spam hasn't shown up anywhere near as much as I've seen in regular server logs, but referrer spam does show up now and then.