[CluckCluck]

Hey,

Just today I've seen a HUGE increase in site traffic from a specific referrer... xa.ly.
I check out their site and apparently it pays affiliates to shorten their URLs (when they get clicked on or something of the sort), however; I continue to receive tons of traffic from them and a small spike in my bounce rate (+1%).
Have any of you gotten this particular site as a referrer? Do you think it's legit traffic or am I getting a fast one pulled on me?

Thanks in advance!

Javier

[simcat]

I saw a bunch of those links on twitter and clicked a few...

I don't think you have much to worry about if you are the destination site,

But the site or person placing the links might need to worry about p!!sing people off... people aren't used to figuring out and doing an extra step in order to visit a link.

But then again, they get a whopping 0.3 cents a click!

I guess if you had incredibly high traffic, where the topic was impossible to monetize, you would take 300 bucks for your 100K clicks.

[bobby131313]

But then again, they get a whopping 0.3 cents a click!

No it's .3¢ per unique visitor. Big difference.

[CluckCluck]

Originally Posted by simcat

I saw a bunch of those links on twitter and clicked a few...

I don't think you have much to worry about if you are the destination site,

But the site or person placing the links might need to worry about p!!sing people off... people aren't used to figuring out and doing an extra step in order to visit a link.

But then again, they get a whopping 0.3 cents a click!

I guess if you had incredibly high traffic, where the topic was impossible to monetize, you would take 300 bucks for your 100K clicks.

Thanks for your opinion, I just thought it was weird since traffic increased so rapidly.
I noticed this morning that I'm still getting quite a bit of referrals from the same URL. I'll keep on eye on this.

[CluckCluck]

Originally Posted by simcat

I guess if you had incredibly high traffic, where the topic was impossible to monetize, you would take 300 bucks for your 100K clicks.

The thing is, I'm not using the service, I hadn't heard about it until I saw traffic coming from it.

[MichaelColey]

Could it be referrer spam? I get quite a bit of that (although I don't recognize this one). Referrer spam isn't real traffic, but just bots leaving referrers in the logs in the hopes that 1) webmasters will see the links and visit and 2) that they'll get backlinks from visible referrer logs.

[CluckCluck]

@MichaelColey, I don't know if that would be the case, in my GA logs it's capturing the site as an actual visitor. Funny enough, as I write this, I have not seen a single visitor come through xa.ly
I don't know, but I think it's over now