Today as i was obsessively checking my referral-stats i noticed a huge increase of traffic coming from the Myspace search engine. I'm suddenly getting thousands of hits for the exact same search term, for which i'm ranking #1. What struck me unusual is that the search phrase is the exact same - no variations or mis-spellings. all the IP's are different and Analytics says all the OS's and browsers are also different. Out of paranoia I removed Adsense from the page (replace it with YPN..hehe)... So, my question is, is there some tell-tale sign i should be looking for to make sure this is legit traffic?
well.. almost exactly 24 hours after it began, the flood of traffic stopped. in total almost 9,000 uniques. i'm still ranking #1 on the Myspace search (powered by Google) for that term, but now traffic is nearly nothing. I have looked at this traffic every-which-way in Analytics and it looks good.. different IP's, different Geo locations, different browsers, OS's, etc... Weird...
It happened to me with a word some time ago, when a celebrity said in a TV show how she lost weight. Maybe something like this happened to you too: a show, a blog entry from someone read by a lot of people etc.
Had the exact same thing happen back in mid-February (not from Myspace, though) I believe there were also a few variants of the search term so maybe not quite exactly the same. This was on a weekend (Sat and a Sun) and come Monday things went back to normal. Google was informed as it was happening and they basically said there was no problem with what I experienced.
Terabite, was that search terms very popular on that particular day? e.g: Obama or Hillary clinton (just an example) This could be possible with some news flashing on that day and people are interested in that keyword. This traffic doesnt last long since people loose interest in that news after some time.
it's a very popular term related to myspace.. what was weird is that it stopped after about 24 hours - but earlier this afternoon it started back up.. sending about 500 - 1,000 uniques per hour.. the other odd thing is that the search phrase is exactly the same - i would expect to see hits for variations on the search phrase, but i'm not.. i'm not complaining - as far as i can tell it's legit traffic.. but i still replaced Adsense with YPn on that page.
Wow, I don't know why that would be happening. Especially with the same search term. There is this website that explains why this may be happening... maybe in some sort of virus, someone is trying to make you and others "look bad" with ad sense and the virus/spyware just went live after a number of computers were infected. I have a stat counter on my website which shows the information of each computer that visits my site (IP, location, browser, OS) Take a look at the operating systems that are visiting your site. Are they all mac and all windows or a mixture of both? If it's only one type, it really could be something fishy considering most viruses are written for only one type of operating system. You can get stae counter from statcounter.com but since you mentioned something about different IP addresses, I'm sure you have something similar. Good luck, Melanie
yeah i checked. of course the vast majority are Internet Explorer, but there are also firefox, opera and Safari... windows xp, 98, 95, and OS X .. and, they arent clicking much on YPN, or on Adsense when i switched it back for a little while..
It could be possible if. A very popular Myspace page has a direct link to google search with that keyword. Every tom dick and harry visiting that page, clicking on that keyword and through google landling on ur page. Thats the only logical answer since its not human typed traffic since there are no variation. This traffic is surely coming from pre-defined keyword Google Search link.
I dont visit myspace... but could it be some form of TAG? Once the tag is clicked it brings up the search results and you happen to be #1 ranked position for it? Obviously not sure as never experienced it - but it does seem 'unusual' if there were no spelling errors or search term variations... as it seems that it may be more than a simple single word query judging by your surprise that no variation/typo existed. (maybe you don't rank anywhere for a variation/typo and only rank on the specific word/phrase?)
This is waht happened to me also afew weeks ago. I was ranked No. 1 for a term on Yahoo and I was literally getting 4/5 visitors a minute for this term. However, all the IP's were unique. I also took adsense of that page and took the page itself off. By the way, did you make money from these hits?
a average pageviews from this source is something like 1.75% Qwest: Yea, about $50 so far from the YPn on the page.