Increased Web Site Traffic

I’m going to explain to you how NOT to get scammed when buying a website. It’s a trick used by those lacking morals and often escapes the eye of IT professionals.

Two days ago, I was presented with an opportunity to buy a popular website that has received a lot of press over the year. The owner didn’t have time to maintain the site and was ready to move on, but bragged about increased web site traffic due to popularity.

Excited, I made an offer contingent upon the review of log files. I’m familiar with the web site, I’ve seen the site in the press and I was confident I found great deal. The log files were provided to me and that’s when things started falling apart.

In the proposal, it was stated that the site had 20,000 visitors. The log files show 20,000 visits, not visitors (there were only 4,000 visitors). A visitor can visit 20 pages of a web site which the log files will record as 1 visitor and 20 visits. Although this is a serious discrepancy, it’s not too hard to spot.

What was hard to spot was the increased web site traffic. The logs verified that these were unique visitors to the web site, with the majority of traffic coming in as referrals (links from other web sites).

I visited the web pages from the referring sites and found an image that people could click on. This image would take them to the site I was interested in buying. Upon closer review, I found that the image was being pulled from the website I wanted to buy rather than hosted on the referring server. That sounds confusing, no? Let me explain it another way…

Every time someone visited a referring website, a request for the image was being sent to the website I was interested in. This means that every visitor viewing a web page with that ad on it was showing up as a unique visitor in the log files; the increased web site traffic was entirely artificial.

Turns out that over 85% of all the traffic was NOT legitimate and had I purchased this domain hoping to monetize it, it would been a major disappointment. The web site owner knew full well that the increased web site traffic was not real and in the end accidentally admitted as much.

There are a ton of scammers out there! Make sure that when you buy a website, you do a very careful review of the log files! If you need assistance reviewing log files, I’d be glad to help provided you make a small donation (cup of chia, etc) by visiting AuditMyPC.com and following the donate button at the top of the page.