I always look at where traffic is coming from, especially from traffic that I purchase. Back in November a client’s site had a huge spike in traffic from junk ad sites. Most of the site ad ads from Yahoo and due to Yahoo’s less than optimal ad software I had to block these sites manually by domain. I had noticed in Compete.com’s site that competitor sites had also been receiving a lot of traffic from these sites.

Today (ok – I let this sit for a while LOL) I think I have uncovered at least one source of traffic to sites like that and confirmed my belief that the sites are as I had suspected junk click sites built for the sole purpose to generate content advertising publishing revenue.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Internet users sign up for a site like www.treasuretrooper.com
  2. They are offered 5 cents to click on links. When I first joined I was offered 7 links and could come back the next day to click some more.
  3. There’s a message that says: “Receive 5 cents for each of the links that you click below! After clicking, please click any link that interests you on the page that pops up. You may click each of these links once every 24 hours. Please note that cash click earnings do not count towards reaching minimum payment.” and a few links:
    1. Asthma Relief Online
    2. My Diabetes Center
    3. Best Online Teaching Degrees
    4. Find Nursing Degrees Online
    5. Best Psychology Degrees Online
    6. Best Guide For Fitness
    7. Bank Account Wizard
    8. When I clicked Find Nursing Degrees I ended up here: Nursing Degree Answers which is a short page with a bunch of Yahoo ads.
    9. That site is similar to a lot of others I have seen that dynamically serves up Yahoo Publisher ads. Search on any topic and you will get different ads.
    10. TreasureTrooper.com is well ranked in countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India which is not bad by itself but if you are a US company doing business only in the US who don’t need that foreign traffic. Although according to Alexa almost 50% of their traffic in the US.
    11. In Alexa one of the suspect sites has 100% of traffic from US which I find hard to believe. However three of my client’s competitors receive between 5% and 11% of their traffic from India but they don’t do business in India.

There’s surely dozens of affiliate sites like these signing up people from low wage Asian or Eastern European countries where a $50+ a month can buy a lot. There’s something terribly wrong about this as someone makes $0.05 cents to click on a link where the advertiser is charged $1-$10+. For the advertiser is results in excessive clicks that don’t convert. If they are not aware of these sites they’ll end up paying a lot more for their online advertising budgets than they should.

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