This is really strange. I did a big round of directory submissions (three of which were paid, everything else was just a reciprocal link), and I'm getting a bunch of hits on my site... ...but only on my PHP-based hit counter. My third party javascript hit counter isn't registering anything. Adsense ads have already been removed, because this worries me. Is there any way to figure out if the traffic is legit? Shouldn't even illegitimate traffic register hits on my javascript counter?
Why not trace the origin of the traffic via hosting panel? Do you submit your site to traffic exchange sites?
If you run adsense on your site, I would investigate this as soon as possible because they can ban the site.
Traffic exchange sites: absolutely not. I think it must have been a spider crawling my site, since the counter that was going up was a php counter that gets loaded every time my footer script gets loaded. It has stopped going up.