Hi guys, i was wondering if there was a way to detect when someone is doing a 302 redirect to my site and how to counter it?. I have a site which about 3 weeks ago started to get some traffic, my stats show this: (The site is about 9 mo. old BTW) Week 1 100~130 unique ip visits (daily) (~10k hits) Week 2 150~200 unique visits (daily) (15~20k hits) Week 3 250~350 uniques (daily) (20~30k hits) During week 1 my sponsors where reporting around 100 uniques (have 3 of them) same during week 2 but this last week my sponsor reports 11 clicks a day!!! , my stat soft also says that only 20% of the traffic leaves within 5secs a and the rest of the traffic stays longer than 5 mins. Could this be somehow related to a 302 redirect or some other problem? Prior to this increase in traffic i was getting around 70~100 uniques a day but my sponsors reported around 70 to 90 % of that traffic (Nice CTR). I dont think its ok for me to post a link to the site without someone complaining about it, its a "clean" gambling and casino site (i try to keep it ****ware free) .... anyhow... could anyone tell me what to look for when it comes to redirects? or an idea of what could be causing this? I have blog which showed the same symptoms but the server was down for a few days....thats why my CTR and traffic went down... this is not the case though
To detect a 302 redirect, look at the referer of your visitors. If you are getting high traffic from a site that does not stick well, or you are not familiar with, check it out. As far as countering a 302 redirect, you can ban the visitor by referer. However, if you suspect problems, you should read Claus Schmidt's page on 302 Page Hijacking and follow the suggestions there. I do not think a dedicated IP is necessary. Google has problems with 302's, and search engines cache urls. They revisit later, with no referer. They will crawl your content, and confuse the redirect with your page. Google has no intention of fixing it, since they see it as helpful in some instances. Those instances are simply bad webmastery IMHO.
Ok now I'm worried... my hosting company keeps reporting an increase in traffic but my sponsors actually report less traffic. When i had around 100 to 150 visitors a day i had more clicks going to my sponsors than now that i have 400+ a day!, this are the stats: Today 525 uniques 2046 pageloads 36431 hits 0.66 GB Thursday 288 2367 29688 0.50 GB Wednesday 214 1591 18937 0.29 GB Tuesday 342 1699 19267 0.26 GB Monday 147 1108 11144 0.14 GB Sunday 117 1245 10498 0.13 GB Saturday 120 1525 12227 0.14 GB Friday 137 uniques 1289 pageloads 16774 hits 0.21 GBtraffic Any ideas?
Most visitors will stick around and read a bit, visit more than one page. If you have a 302 redirect pointing in, and the topic is not relevant, they will not stick around - they will close the browser or click on a link out - if it is relevant to what they are looking for. You need to be looking at raw access logs or 'latest visitors' stats to find the 302. Sometimes you can find them by searching Google for your page titles in quotes - 302 sites are often generated from search engine results, and the anchor will be your page title. Not all 302's are a bad thing, if you have taken the proper precautions in the link I gave above. Many advertising systems and directories use them to track outgoing traffic.