WHAT are these people doing?

[DoYouKubuntu]

For several months I've seen a trend in my site stats that doesn't make sense--to me. Now there's a different spin on it, and the new trend also makes no sense--to me.

Basically, here's the deal. I'll see visits from foreign countries to one of my web sites. A typical entry looks like this:







That's it; they always just access the home page for that site.

Now the new twist:





These arrive from here: http://make-money-online.7makemoneyo...vygearshop.com

But going to http://make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com/money.php doesn't reveal anything to me that clues me in on what they're doing. As with the original trend, these visitors are only accessing the home page for that site and then leaving.

I don't get it. Any ideas?

[SteveRiley]

Looks like some affiliate marketing / search engine optimization thing.

steve@t520:~/junk$ [B]wget -S http://make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com/money.php[/B]
--2014-12-12 15:06:52--  http://make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com/money.php
Resolving make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com (make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com)... 217.23.7.144
Connecting to make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com (make-money-online.7makemoneyonline.com)|217.23.7.144|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
[COLOR="#B22222"]  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily[/COLOR]
  Server: nginx/1.6.1
  Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 23:06:52 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Connection: keep-alive
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.15
  Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
[COLOR="#B22222"]  Location: http://7makemoneyonline.com/
Location: http://7makemoneyonline.com/ [following][/COLOR]
--2014-12-12 15:06:52--  http://7makemoneyonline.com/
Resolving 7makemoneyonline.com (7makemoneyonline.com)... 217.23.7.180
Connecting to 7makemoneyonline.com (7makemoneyonline.com)|217.23.7.180|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
[COLOR="#B22222"]  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily[/COLOR]
  Server: nginx/1.6.1
  Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 23:06:52 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Connection: keep-alive
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.16
[COLOR="#B22222"]  Location: http://7makemoneyonline.com/autoseo/
Location: http://7makemoneyonline.com/autoseo/ [following][/COLOR]
--2014-12-12 15:06:52--  http://7makemoneyonline.com/autoseo/
Reusing existing connection to 7makemoneyonline.com:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.6.1
  Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 23:06:52 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Connection: keep-alive
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.16
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: ‘money.php’

    [ <=>                                                                                                                    ] 4,355       --.-K/s   in 0s      

2014-12-12 15:06:52 (116 MB/s) - ‘money.php’ saved [4355]

Adding the parameter that points back to your web site doesn't actually change the returned content -- it's still that SEO thing. But maybe some backend code there is scraping your site for whatever reason. TBH, it's not something you can stop.

[anika200]

Digging into my memory, (not always good) there was a group of people or company 2-5 years ago that had figured out how skim ad money from Google by spoofing traffic stats via trips to other peoples web sites somehow.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thanks for the input so far. I just don't get it. And what's weird, or part of what's weird, is how the visits are ALWAYS from foreign countries.

[SteveRiley]

Maybe it can be explained with statistics because they seem to indicate there are more foreign countries than domestic ones...

LOL

The US is:

• 1 out of 196 countries = 0.5%
• 319,265,000 people out of 7,238,184,000 = 4.4%
• 9,629,000 km^2 out of 510,072,000 km^2 = 1.9%

[DoYouKubuntu]

Maybe it can be explained with statistics because they seem to indicate there are more foreign countries than domestic ones...

I'd buy that, except that it just doesn't make sense. The overwhelming majority of sales, probably around 95%, that I get are from the US. Granted, those sales are from my actual shops, not my domains' web sites that essentially just act as a landing spot to point visitors to my shops. But still. ALL of these weird visits are from foreign countries? Weird!

[Feathers McGraw]

Most of the hosting companies that "specialise" in looking the other way are from countries like China, Russia, the Ukraine etc. My site gets a huge amount of spammy traffic from these places too.

[SteveRiley]

Possibly of related interest.

Wired: Bots now outnumber humans on the Web

[Feathers McGraw]

That's a good article, nice and concise with lots of information.

I thought this was particularly interesting:

Incapsula recently an an analysis of 20,000 websites to get a snapshot of part of the web, and on smaller websites, it found that bot traffic can run as high as 80 percent.

That wouldn't surprise me at all. The difference between something like Google analytics (I used it for a few months before I realised what it means for people, and then deleted it) and stats generated from log files is huge partly because of this: many of the bots don't use JavaScript so they don't show up on GA. I bet the really clever ones appear just like normal humans though.

I always wondered about Open Web Analytics, I may have to look into it again and see if it's any good.

I also notice that Google's spiders are much more efficient than other search engines if you use sitemaps properly. There's a module for Drupal that automatically creates a sitemap and submits an updated version to Google when there's new content... pretty cool.