[danieltay]

Hi everyone!

I am new to this forum and I am not sure if this is the right place to post my question.

But I am sure I am with good hands.

I am new to affiliate marketing and decided to join the competitive financial market(credit card) about 6 months ago.

I am not sure if anyone heard about an automated program that click on the credit card link of a certain network. This will results in click throughs that will not generate any sales. Furthermore, this will create false stats reports on the number of clicks for the credit card offers.

Thus far there is no concrete evidence until I experince it first hand recently.

It all started when my AWSTATS show a suspicious report on keywords search.

I've been getting good traffic on "gas credit card"(based on AWSTAT) but when I try searching for the term on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, I can't found my page listed in the first 3 pages.

So I decided to do some testing by changing the credit card link to a new network provider. What shock me is that the old network provider stat report still show I am getting click throughs for credit card offers that are no longer on my site.

I've also notice that the search term "gas credit cards" on my site increase. But ironically there is no click on my new network for gas related credit cards.

The funny thing is the click thorughs I got on my old stat are all gas related credit cards.

I am not sure why such automated programs existed, perhaps it's due to business rivalry, to undermine the competitor reputation.

But what really worry me is that my AWSTAT is no longer accurate and reliable.

I need the stat to do my advertising planning and decide on time spend on this financial market(Note : The false stats has somehow influence me to spend so much time on the promotion of the site which I could use better elsewhere)

I am not sure if this is cause by AWSTAT, viruses or spywares like parasiteware. But I am very surprised by the "inteligence" of this automated program in altering the AWSTAT and performing relevant keywords related click throughs.

So I seek the advice of experts in this forum to eliminate such problems once and for all.

Please share your expertise and any similar experience.

Thank you.

[Trust]

"I am not sure if anyone heard about an automated program that click on the credit card link of a certain network."

Yeah, they have those out there, here's a story of them clicking on Adsense:

http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/...es/001853.html

As far as the second part, maybe someone copied or scraped parts of your site and didn't change the links? It's happened before. Not sure if that's whats happening.