Mystery about referral stats after doing a Tweet?

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Mystery about referral stats after doing a Tweet?

trader

5:04 pm on Mar 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

I noticed several times when doing a new Tweet and looking at my referral log stats there is something odd in that about 80% of the visits to my link are from: compute-1.amazonaws.com

For example, with my last 2 Tweets there were about 50 visitors to my 2 linked sites within 5 minutes of the Tweets, with about 40 from that same referral source.

Does anyone know how that could be happening, or take a guess how it's possible? I have already tried to research this mystery a bit without success.

keyplyr

7:07 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)

compute-1.amazonaws.com is Amazon's Cloud Computing and a haven for nefarious bot runners who wish to hide their identity.

Related (long) thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

Note - Many webmasters block these, and other, cloud IP ranges.

trader

7:25 pm on Mar 30, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks but any idea what that it's all about or the purpose of them doing it so heavily?

keyplyr

8:50 am on Mar 31, 2011 (gmt 0)

...any idea what that it's all about or the purpose of them doing it so heavily?

Scraping your content, copying your website, harvesting your image files, retrieving data about the way your server handles requests, indexing your website for whatever utility they are promoting or selling... take your pick. Information is money. Chances are since they are hiding in the cloud, they are up to no good.

Several agents from what has been labelled as the "Twitter Swarm" are spin-off businesses that compile Twitter activity. Probably harmless except for the fact they are making a profit using your (and everybody else's) tweets/links.

Spend some time reading the above thread.