Hey everyone, I run a proxy site and it looks like I am being targetted for click fraud. This is a site that gets an average of about 200 impressions a day. I woke up today to find out I had 50,000 impressions!! My clicks went through the roof.. from 8 clicks avg per day to THOUSANDS (literally). My CTR is still the same since I installed AdLogger which keeps people from clicking more than once but it's still a fairly large amount of money. Even with the low CPC (since most of it is foreign traffic), I still made close to $500 today. Am I happy? Hell no. I am SO WORRIED about Google banning me that I shut the website down. I have no idea where all this traffic is coming from. From a quick at the log files, most of it is coming from http://filthyloaded.com/cash but my link is nowhere to be seen on that site. I also found out that these "bots" click on any link thats on the site, so if I linked this traffic to one of your sites, your site will get bogged down as well. It's nuts. So clearly, I am a target for someone and I am out of ideas on how to stop it, and more importantly how to prevent myself from getting banned. I e-mailed Google 2 days ago about high CTR on this site and got their standard response. Should I e-mail them again? Has anyone else experienced this besides me? This is crazy.
Yeah remove the code but also gather up as many site stats as possible in preparation for handing to Google.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=235482 SAME EXACT THING! Same thing, I got the hits from the same exact URL, and its also a proxy site. Very, very strange indeed
Wow, clearly someone is targetting proxy sites. I am not sure what the URL is either. What I am doing right now is installing GeoIP on my server and disabling access to anyone except US, UK, Canada and Australian users since most of those ips seem to be foreign. But I am not sure if that is good enough. I will take down Adsense and e-mail Google again as the others mentioned. Thanks a lot guys.
If you get more then X amount of clicks per visitor/IP, google stops counting those clicks after a certain amount. Perhaps you made it on to the first page for a good keyword or phrase?
I dont think so since there are no search engine referrals or anything. Just referrals from the URL I posted in the original post. Looks like it's some kinf of an auto surf program or something.. I am not sure..
If you had emailed Google, and removed adsense code, I think you should be OK. I am confused about not getting respond from Google, I have emailed them lot of times when I thought that something could be bad, and they've always answered in 24 hours
Can't you use .htaccess to block traffic from http://filthyloaded.com/cash ? Just put that code in my .htaccess file (because I own proxies also).
i've gotten some hits (only 6) on one of my proxies from that same website. since you notified google as soon as you saw the issue, i don't believe you have a problem. they aren't out to get people that have legitimate problems like this.
Thanks for the .htaccess tip. I implemented it but the thing is that while a handful of these are referral traffic from that URL, a lot of them are direct hits. I also implemented the GeoIP thing and I Was right in that all this traffic is foreign (Slovenia, Hungary, Russia, etc). I will compile a list of these ips for you guys to use if you are in the same situation as I am so that you can block it from your server. Give me a few.
ok there's way too many ips to list so I cant post it here but GeoIP is working great so I suggest you guys install it on your server and block all foreign traffic for your proxies.
Do what was suggested to me in the other thread, install Adlogger. I've found it to be very helpful already
You did the right thing reporting it to Google, it's always safer to be upfront when you've got an issue like this, no reporting it only makes you look guilty. As for this filthyloaded mob, I've seen the same referrer in my logs, but I presumed it was referral spam as opposed to anything more serious, particularly given what's on the landing page.
The .htaccess stuff does work good. Except I'd probably direct all that traffic back to them instead of fading it away.
If your CTR stayed the same it's fine. Your site just became popular. It happens with proxies. Enjoy your earnings. $500 a day is a decent adsense income.