Sky Lancers: What is the deal?

[Discountvc]

For a few days now we are being stalked by a "referrer" site out of Bangladesh, called sky lancers dot net. Their home page is nothing but a login and password. All traffic comes from one invisible inner page. They don't seem to try to login, nor do they use PPC to get to the site. They send thousands of visitors a day.

Anyone has any idea what this site is trying to achieve and what their goal may be?

All they do is get the bounce rate to skyrocket, the time on the site to go down and the avg page views of course to go down as well, as they click out immediately after they hit the homepage.

Any suggestions on what to do about this practice? And what are they trying to achieve?

Thanks for your insights guys!

[RyanKent]

Hi Peter,

I sympathize with your situation. Since the home page is blank with just a login feature you have no information about the site or its purpose. A Google search for the site shows nothing but the home page. A WHOIS search shows the site owner is private.

There is no way to know the reason behind the traffic. Someone could have shared a "free stuff" post and for whatever reason provided a link to your site. When users arrive at your site they are of course disappointed then leave.

Some options:

• contact the site owner via the WHOIS e-mail. Ask the site owner to remove the link.

• block all traffic from Bangladesh. This option will work if all or most of the traffic is from that site.

• block all traffic which shows that site as a referrer. I have never implemented such a solution but your web host can likely offer options in this regard. You may have to implement a firewall.

Best wishes

[icecarats]

Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.

If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.

[Discountvc]

awesome answer Ryan, thank you! We blocked the referrers IP but that does not seem to make any difference (yet).

Just puzzled by a site that has no apparent meaning and thousands of people must have a login to that thing. Maybe it is a reroute from somewhere else... no clue.

Will give your advice a go tomorrow and surely will let you know the outcome.

Peter

[Discountvc]

Great idea too, Valery.

The visits however are for 85% new visitors, all with unique IP addresses. Don't really think it is a scraper, but it is well possible there is a connection somewhere out there.

Thank you!

[KeriMorgret]

It looks like it's related to a toolbar where people are paid to click on ads. Skylancers.net and skylancers.com appear to be connected, based on the whois info, and on this FB post http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skylancers/200579273364198\. Check out the dot com site for some more info.

[Discountvc]

Yep, I found that as well. The "Paid To Click" is an old trick, but they are not coming in through PPC though. Adwords is not showing any sign either, nor is tracking of PPC. that toolbar is an interesting path I have to say.

Thanks for the research Keri!

[sfmatthews]

I am seeing it as well. It is really making my analytics a mess, anyone know how to make Google analytics ignore it after the fact?

[Discountvc]

As an update, those visits as we see them in Analytics are not hitting our servers. Not sure how they are doing this, but traffic does show in analytics but we do not see any spike on our servers.

We take the country out through filters at this point so we can at least review some true data.

Your question about how to ignore it after the fact can be done similar:

Go to Google Analytics > Custom Reports > Add Filter > EXCLUDE the country > Save

Now your GA will show all past results without those entries.

It is a custom report, but better than no data at all?

Hope this helps

[AskJoanne]

Saw an interesting article related to this sort of thing... they call it Analytics SPAM and have some suggestions for removing it from your reports:

http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/

[Discountvc]

Thanks Joanne!!! Great tip for those who have this problem occur as well.

In a nutshell, only your Analytics is out of wack. Your hosting server (usually) will not show increased traffic. Many newly launched sites are affected by a variety of similar 'referrers'

Personally, I ignored the referrer and it disappeared as sudden as it came, after one month. Exactly as the article suggests.

[fatetmpwcosl]

... There is a table on the web page (scroll down) which you may discover quite beneficial. It outlines the various pitfalls of various styles of neighborhood-precise URLs, you can see here. I'd count on this form of stuff to maintain actual for the newer provincial TLDs