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Keri, Happy belated Thanksgiving! It's been about 3.5 months, so just wanted to give a quick update on this in case anyone else is still having this issue. Unfortunately, we haven't really seen a solution to this but have improved our situation. During the period of September 10-17, we contacted Perfect Audience to see if they were experiencing the same security issues as AdRoll. They confirmed that they too had seen some customers affected by this invalid traffic and so their engineers worked on modifying their tag to "no longer track IE7 traffic" and "blacklist all domains" that the traffic was coming from." Unfortunately, this had no positive effect on our client's traffic issues. Half-way through October, we saw invalid traffic spike once again into the thousands and stay there until around mid-November. Half-way through November, the client migrated to a secure site (HTTPs), which actually made a notable difference in the invalid traffic, causing it to reduce down to, what we might consider, normalized numbers. Although this seemed to help, unfortunately it still didn't completely address the problem. Today, we're still seeing IE7 as the top browser with 95% bounce rate. At this point, we're just left to run filters to exclude the IE7 traffic until this essentially resolves itself (crossing fingers).

Felip3, Thanks for the response. I agree - it's too easy for spammers to attack and destroy brands. I especially agree, and have always been proponent, of diversifying traffic sources. Of course, when the majority of website traffic is coming from Organic (as it was for us) and then drops off, it can still leave a bruise. Thanks, Mike

By different domains I'm assuming you're referring to the top level domains (ex: .ca, .co.uk., .gr, etc.) If this is the case, we are NOT doing SEO on multiple domains. The entire global strategy will be on the same ".COM" domain. In other words, each country will have its own sub folder. For example: Canada = http://www.client.com/ca/ United Kingdom = http://www.client.com/ca/ etc. They want to do SEO for 36 countries in one year, but since each country has at least 2 different languages, we're essentially doubling that number to 72 campaigns. Is this safe or are we going to get busted for looking spammy at this level of growth?

I believe this has to do with how Google groups things. A few years back people talked about using this trick in reverse by changing num=10 to num=9, num=8, etc. If the first result had two domains, one that was indented, the second indented result might actually be at result 10, but since they were from the same domain, they were grouped together. If it was result 10, and you should just nine results, suddenly you'd see that "second" place link disappear. My guess is this is what's happening here. Some of those results are in places 11-50 and showing up in the indented results.