Tech Toplist Traffic Scam

[borg2of5]

Hi

I have the feeling that some top-lists send fake (bot) traffic. Although it seems to be some headless-browser traffic (selenium, phantomjs?) and some development effort has been done in order to make them look like human, I think they are bots.

My normal bounce rate: about 30 %
Bounce rate from these 4 top lists: about 5 %

Now comes the fun part (because when you developed your analytics tool by yourself, you have full control )

- N > 5 % of the total hits of one toplist, have also been referred by another toplist (which is kinda odd)
- The time between opening the website and the first click has a variation between all these users which is less than 10 seconds (tMax - tMin < 10 sec)
- None of these users stay on the startpage for more than a minute (users from other sources average 1:13 min on the startpage)
- All users have JavaScript enabled

So what did I do?

I implemented a more advanced bot check in my application: I consider a user real once he moves the mouse and/or swipes the screen.

Now this is running since two hours, and see:

- About 85 % of my users from other sources trigger the botcheck event (I think the other 15% have the browser cache not loading the new JS code)
- About 0.5 % of the users from all these toplists trigger the botcheck event

Here's a good guy. He's not a bot. He opened the startpage and triggered the bot check:
i.imgur.com/91w4Mci.png

Here's a bot. It's a Windows 10 computer and clicked on a tag on the startpage. He inevitably had to move the mouse but didn't: i.imgur.com/d1REqn4.png (I don't have 30 posts, can't add URLs)

Also note: "ClosePage" is JavaScript triggered therefore they are executing JavaScript.

I am aware that some of these will obviously just implement a mouse move.

I'm not sure if I can just post the URLs here without getting sued by them, but I suggest: analyze your link-partners and see if the users that they are sending are behaving in the same way as your own users.

In my conclusion they are bots! You can find excuses for one or two not moving the mouse. But since I started tracking it, I'm speaking of hundreds, and everyone else but refs from these toplists, moving.

These toplists are sending hundreds of bots to you to make you think they are actual users, so that you keep the link to their page

I'm flying to vacation tomorrow, but I'm pissed (maybe for everyone else here, it's old news) and I'm going to make my bot detection better and more generic. Also, when I'm done, I will make it available for free for everyone so that these toplist-scammers can fuck off.

So:

- Did anyone experience the same?
- How can I help others not falling for it as well?

[celandina]

What are you selling ?

[borg2of5]

Ah I was so enraged that I forgot to make my point, I'm selling nothing:

- Did anyone experience the same?
- How can I help others not falling for it as well?

[CurrentlySober]

i just like poo... it's much simpler...

[Klen]

Majority of trade traffic sites does not get any google traffic, so you cant really expect real traffic from there. Also, you need to use skype, ICQ is obsolete.

[borg2of5]

I didn't expect stable high quality US-only traffic but sending me >99% bots is kinda rude

you need to use skype, ICQ is obsolete.

I'll set that up, thanks. Although I thought both were equally dead

[Klen]

Originally Posted by borg2of5

I didn't expect stable high quality US-only traffic but sending me >99% bots is kinda rude


I'll set that up, thanks. Although I thought both were equally dead

Do it and post your id, so we can discuss further about bots and other fun tech stuff.

[ANAL PASTE]

I think 90% of top list traffic is bots. Whats left over of top lists.

[TACNet]

It could also be one of these autosurfing apps trying to bump themselves up your link list

A while back we had an affiliate sending in over 5000 a day from https://www.otohits.net/. Complete waste of time as its just a bunch of webmasters with an autosurf app running in the background. Overall he sent in over 3 million hits and not one single conversion

Now we have another one sending in around 1,500 a day. Every single one says its from facebook.com or google.com but strangely around a 3rd of these appear to click onto our join page although not one of them has ever actually submitted it.

Its clearly bot traffic but i dont understand the reason for it. We are not sending anything back and we only pay out when a user converts so why bother ??

[borg2of5]

Do it and post your id, so we can discuss further about bots and other fun tech stuff.

live:borg2of5_1
can't wait to discuss fun stuff!

Every single one says its from facebook.com or google.com

I also have a lot of such "fake" Google-ref traffic. It says to come from "google.com" which makes no sense because google always auto-redirects to the "www" subdomain and thereforce only sends traffic from "www google com" (again, I don't have 30 posts, I had to destroy this domain...). I always assumed it's actually people who try to hide their ref via browser addon for privacy and anti-tracking purposes.

Sometimes I have more fake-Google traffic than actual Google traffic...

[TACNet]

Originally Posted by borg2of5

I also have a lot of such "fake" Google-ref traffic. It says to come from "google.com" which makes no sense because google always auto-redirects to the "www" subdomain and thereforce only sends traffic from "www google com" (again, I don't have 30 posts, I had to destroy this domain...). I always assumed it's actually people who try to hide their ref via browser addon for privacy and anti-tracking purposes.

Sometimes I have more fake-Google traffic than actual Google traffic...

Thats interesting. I just checked and they are all coming from www google.com and www Facebook.com but from the http versions (not https) so its definitely bot traffic as legit traffic would come from https.

There's all different browsers and different IPs but ALL of them are via the same affiliate code.

Makes it a pain in the ass when trying to compare traffic stats month on month as you never know how much of it is fake

Really dont know why they bother