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So, what was the trouble I mentioned yesterday, which made Google warn me by email?
Apparently, there are some programs for generating traffic and/or clicks artificially, which Google doesn’t like, of course.
This appears to be related to referer spam, which sends a lot of hits with fake referers (such as casino sites), because many people and sites have public statistics, which may mean improved PageRank for the spammer’s site. If they spam thousands of sites this way… it can really make a huge difference.
This new case, however, doesn’t appear to be “true” referer spam, but traffic exchangers or autosurf programs.
For instance, last month the top referers for this blog were:
That’s an image, of course. I would never link to such sites. 
Note, by the way, how close the numbers are… can you say “automated”?
I have just blocked those, and others (go here for some tips on doing so with Apache).
It’s quite likely that blog exchangers are considered “bad”, too. And if Google is cracking down on such services, it may be a good time to stop using them (and to edit that part of the series). Most poeople really use them just to surf for credits, though I have been lucky to discover a couple of very interesting blogs, which I read to this day, there.
Related posts:
So google decided to punish traffic exchange owners instead of punishing their members who trying to cheat them. Even 50 dollar script for advertising have IP tracking and banning feature. I belive that Google have few bucks more than $50 to buy yourself a decent adword/adsense script.
Who to to fu** are they to determine which way of advertising is allowed and which one is not as long as way of advertising is legal??? And I do not see that traffic exchanges are illegal.
Fantastic. Good idiotic move from Google. Another one of course.
oh no i must turn off the auto surf, i hope i don’t get banned
thanks for your info