Links from Impossible Places

**Alex_Manifest_M** · 08-13-2007, 08:46 PM

Okay...maybe not totally impossible but invisible..I am getting ridiculous numbers of hits from pages that either make no sense or I can not figure out what they say.

This one for instance (2545 today it says)

http://h50178.www5.hp.com/support/PH...b-40647-1.html

Or this one (1723 today) http://rs45l34.rapidshare.com/files/...55/charlie.avi

Or this one (1663 today) http://absolutemuscle.com

Does anybody have any ideas?

**Lee** · 08-13-2007, 08:52 PM

Its referral spoofing, this is something that has become more and more popular over the last 12 months from theiving webmasters trying to gain access to your members area feeds by putting in referring URLs that make no sense whatsoever.

I found a site a few weeks ago that was doing this, for some reason to access paid feeds we dont even have LOL

It could also be that they are sending traffic from sites with illegal content on them and they are spoofing the referral URL to hide this fact from you, the best way i have found to combat this is just to de-active the affiliates account until they get in touch, sooner or later they will contact you to find out why they arent making any sales from their sites full of stolen content $0.02

Regards,

Lee

**Alex_Manifest_M** · 08-13-2007, 09:36 PM

Thank you. I am not sure how to determine if this is coming from an affiliate and if so, which one might be doing it. I am getting this information from Open Tracker and AWStats which shows all the referring sites. What would be the best way to determine if it was from a bad affiliate?

**Lee** · 08-13-2007, 10:10 PM

If you have affiliates that have a lot of sales but very few referring URLs, its always worth asking CCBill to check in to those sales, i do it all the time.

Other than that, there really isnt a lot that can be done until the chargebacks start rolling in (presuming its carding or affiliate scamming) if they are using illegal/stolen content then there isnt much you can do other than wait until someone tells you your links are on a site using it then terminate the affiliate in question.

The one thing i really do wish CCBill had was the ability to see referring URLs for all hits, not just the ones that made sales broken down by affiliates.

Regards,

Lee

**JamesXR** · 08-14-2007, 12:05 PM

We once got 60,000+ visitors from a Russian livejournal account that grabbed a picture of our jeweled butt plugs. It almost made me cry that we don't ship to Russia or Ukraine, where most of that traffic came from. I think it was honest traffic from high fraud countries.
Sometimes it just happens.

**jIgG** · 08-14-2007, 12:55 PM

nah don't sweat it, they probably won't buy anyways - sex shops in that part of the world often times mingle among regular ones in the downtown areas :baby: and then you have the shipping + customs which would jack up costs even more

otoh i've seen russian sex toy shop ads on a lot of russian sites that have nothing do with sex or toys LOL

re the links - what is someone typed the url while on the page itself? wont that show as a referrer page that they came from? / nm i just re-read the post ...

i've seen some of the password trading sites mask urls that way and by using url forward services

**JamesXR** · 08-14-2007, 01:24 PM

It wasn't an ad, it was a a mention and with no affiliate code, but we've blocked Russian and Ukraine due to fraud. Actually our international shipping rates kick ass. We can sometimes ship sex toys into Europe that are cheaper with shipping than their local sticker prices. Of course the customers have to deal with customs, but shipping doesn't hold us back too much, and it's fast.