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Malicious clicking from seo website

         

Alphawave2000

7:44 pm on Jun 3, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



I visited this website to check how many pages my sites has. The part of the site I used is free. The site has sitelinks in Google and has plans for beginners and pro and enterprise solutions and that's how they make their money. It's all in US dollars and the site looks professional and well designed. There is a good about page and there are linked in accounts and pictures of all their employees. Their address is at the bottom of every page and it is from Estonia :( A small European country.

I keep getting one visitor that was referred from this domain show up on my analytics. No where on this site does it have a page that shows sites that have used their services recently so I know it must be an employee or some such. Even so, I thought, they're bound to get bored and stop visiting sooner or later. No, there have been repeated visits for 2 weeks now, one visitor always referred from this domain. Today he or she visited 24 pages on my site. And my adsense revenue has jumped today. Google is usually pretty good and knows that clicks like this are silly and wipes them. However I don't want to be kicked off if it keeps occurring.

So what's the solution? Do I block the whole country through htaccess. It has a small population and won't hurt my site in the least. But will this person get annoyed that I've blocked them and cause more devastation. What would you do and what should I do? The person should have got bored by now but keeps visiting.

tangor

10:18 pm on Jun 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Did anyone say Welcome to Webmasterworld?

Use of third party sites for whatever reason is often seen as permission by that site to abuse the user.

One reason why I never use "on line testing services".

If the hits are intrusive, or non beneficial, you can always deny via .htaccess, or whatever your server uses for that function.

Alphawave2000

10:33 pm on Jun 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



Thank you for the welcome tangor!

I can imagine that it happens though, some employee gets interested in a site that uses it's services. I just never thought it would happen to me.

I since looked at my adsense and the clicks were not from that country so I've left it. It still bothers me though as I've had that visitor visit 3 times today! My site is in a very tight niche so there's no reason for the interest.

I don't know how to block the visitor but I will block the country if it keeps happening. It's a tiny East European country with a small population.

tangor

11:13 pm on Jun 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Track their IP address, find the range, and block that. I've had more than a few who have been overly attracted to specific pages on my site(s) and nuked 'em in .htaccess without taking out an entire country. :)

tangor

11:13 pm on Jun 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Who knows why some pages have that much interest?

NickMNS

11:59 pm on Jun 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Don't be naive. It's a bot, and most likely referrer spam.

How does it work (simplified)
You go to the site, by using their tools, you add your site to a their list of domains. Then their bot sends request to your Google Analytics account with their website as the referrer. You check your Analytics, see many referrals from website ABC, so you go see why or how they are linking to you. You go back to their website. In a best case scenario, they get to pitch you again for a paid service, in a worst case scenario, they direct you to some malicious links or downloads.

Check you raw server logs, my guess is that you wont find a request associated with the "visit" in GA, in which case you will know that it is referrer spam. If you do find the request, and IP you can then block it.

Alphawave2000

1:06 am on Jun 5, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



@NickMNS

With respect, Google Analytics do a very good job of knowing what is a bot and what isn't. Plus I have my own intelligence.

I know how bots work. I've actually been making websites for over 15 years and full time for 13. I know when a visitor is a human and when it isn't.

I do thank you for your last paragraph though.

levo

9:46 pm on Jun 5, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



You can disable adsense for visitors referred from that domain, or show alternative advertisements etc.