IrritatingTraffic from Unwanted Sources

I do not enjoy getting traffic from sites that have a bad name. It has happened to me though. How did I find out?

Quite a few months ago I checked the stats of one of my self-hosted sites in my control panel, and saw that quite a bit of traffic was coming from a site I hadn't heard of. My first instinct was to think "That's nice - somebody has a link to my site and I'm getting a lot of traffic from it."

I Googled the site. Plenty of results came up, most of them with the word "scam" attached to them. I didn't like that. At the time I was worried about what Google Adsense would think if I had people visiting my site and clicking my ads, if they had come from a link on a site that had the word "scam" affiliated to it.

I spent a lot of time looking into it more, and saw that other people were also irritated about getting traffic from that site. Over time my traffic from that site has decreased, even stopped I think, now, but at the time I was absolutely furious.

Upon visiting the site I could find no link to my own site. How did they do it? Why did they do it?

To me it seemed that whatever it was that they were doing, was being done all the time, as much as possible - causing curious people checking their stats to go visit the site to find where their link was. A seemingly random method of hoping to get traffic? Not if thousands of curious people checked their stats daily, and followed up on where the hits were coming from. To me it was just plain unwanted spam!

In the end I did nothing, as the traffic eventually slowed down, and, I think, stopped - I haven't noticed it in my stats recently.

Prior to doing nothing about it, though, and finding out that Adsense could not really get upset about where my traffic was coming from (and only get upset about where I was linking to ) I was worried sick about how Adsense would view the situation.

I tried to find out how to contact the site owners to ask them to remove my link from wherever it was on their site, but had no luck.

I got more and more frustrated about it, and wrote a blog post about it on one of my blogs. I used keywords associated with the site, in the hope that some people who had had the same problem would find my blog article and offer some advice.  It worked, and some people gave some great ideas in the comments.

I never did do anything about it though, and have since pretty much relaxed about the whole episode. Other sites are doing the same thing now though, and if the traffic from these sites gets really ridiculous, I may use some of the advice that was offered.

Perhaps many people don't really mind where their traffic is coming from, as long as they are getting a lot of a traffic.  I am not one of those people, but I am not going  to spend hours trying to sort it out if the traffic is not too high, either.