Early this afternoon I began receiving unsubscribe requests via the feedback form on our Australian Dating Guide. Shortly after, the data centre which we lease a server from forwarded a email from Spamcop indicating that the page http://www.australian-dating-guide.com/directory/adult.html was being spamvertised.
My immediate reaction was that we were the victims of a Joe Job – an unsolicited email forged to appear as though it came from an innocent party. I couldn’t however identifiy the motivation for such an action.
I immediately put a notice on the spamvertised page anouncing that we had no connection with the email and asking that recipients forward a copy of the email to our “abuse” email address. It only took a minute or so before I had several copies and it was easy to identify the source IP address of the email. As I was working with a client at the time I wasn’t able to do any searches on this IP until several hours later, however I did start pondering on what could be the motivation of the sender of the email. It seemed that it would have to have come from someone who would benefit from extra traffic to that page and that would most likely be one of the dating sites listed on that page.
Soon as the client left I did a search on occurances of the IP address from the emails and found many examples of postings in forums with the url of a particular dating site. Also our server logs showed repeat visits from the same IP address and these visits were referred from the stats page of this dating site. As their stats page seems to be password protected these visits had to come from someone who had admin acess to the site.
So at this point we think we have a culprit. The modus operandi is relatively simple. Rather than spamvertise your own site, spamvertise a page on another site that links to your page.
Anyway enough of that – lets look at the impact. Traffic jumped immediately. Over a 5 hour period the site had 1000+ extre unique visits. 10 % of the visits translated to click throughs to listed sites. We are affiliates to two other sites on listed on the page in question and to be blunt, the conversion rate was shocking. A typical “you can bring a horse to water but you cant make it drink it” scenerio.
What was interesting was the massive increase in adsense click throughs. The extra traffic over a 8 hour period has translated to a 500% increase in adsense revenue for the day. For the sake of the advertisers I hope this translates to an incremental increase in sales.
As far as extra traffic go I’ve taken the following graph from mrtg. Now it worth noting that this server is strictly low traffic. We use it for email and DNS backup. I run Australian Dating Guide off one of the spare IP as google has a bit of a “duplicate content” issue between it and Our
ezifriends resources listing.
Anyway there is an obvious traffic spike as can be seen in this graph
The graphic indicates that the initial emails must have started as early as 10:30 am. Traffic starts to rise arond 11:00am and peaks at around 2pm. Traffic finally decays to the baseline at around midnight. Traffic rose again for a short period on Saturday but not as substantially.