Hey Set, That's not quite true. The CTR stayed the same because of AdLogger (I am limitting 1 click per ip for 24 hours). They were definitely infected zombie computers just going after link after link. Daz was experiencing the same thing. Someone is out there to get proxy sites banned and I know other people who got banned because of this EXACT SAME issue. I implemented GeoIP today allowing only certain countries to go through, .htaccess, and banned the offending ip addresses on my firewall. Finally, I e-mailed Google with complete details. I was also able to grab these ip addresses automatically to an sql database. As you can see, some of those ips are hitting the website over and over and over even though the GeoIP is not letting them see anything except a blank page. That is why I know these are bots, not genuine users who somehow found out about my website. http://www.marketingrookie.com/others/banthese.html I hope this helps.
Then perhaps it's because competition in proxy niche is tough. But I don't see much of repeated IPs. And even so these might be different users from the some large LAN that has one global IP. That SQL dump looks like some decent traffic. Weird that you have only IE users. Maybe this traffic comes indeed from infected computers.
After thinking about this thread for a day, and seeing filthyloaded increase in the referrer logs from 2 to 16 overnight on one site, I've just implemented Adlogger to be on the safe side...and particularly given one of my proxies is tipping 30% CTR for the day so far, it's had an decent increase in traffic, but the CTR is suspicious at best. If anyone else is seeing this for sure, let us know, I'll follow up once I've logged some of the activity.
Nnet, we're all experiencing it.. And Marketing Rookie, thank you so much for that list. I've mailed adsense again, but yet again no decent reply. Funny, how desperate proxy owners get to take out the competition. My only question would be is this person or these people conducting this.. Are they reading this?