Strange stuff in web logs

[Steve Morris]

Hi all,
I've been seeing some strange stuff in my logs mainly being lots of click through for a very general term in relation to my site now I Know my site does not rank anywhere for this term. I have had this before and after i noticed it the last time, my rankings dropped across the board for everything . Is there somthing underhand going on here?

 

[samk32]

Hello Steve,

I think that you are ranking higher for the term on other search partners of google. One of my customer had this situation when they were getting clicks from some unknown source. We later on found that they were ranking high on google and msn search partners.

There is a good chance but I would still suggest that you check your weblogs.

I will also suggest using marketleap for tracking your backlinks. You might also be getting backlinks from some high ranking website in your niche.

 

[Steve Morris]

I think something more underhand is going on. my thoughts are that someone is making a lot of automated queries to the search engine trying to make it look like my site is spamming. The logs show multiple hits from the same ip range for the same keyword with only one page loading

 

[fred333]

That sounds very underhanded. Which analytics service do you use?

 

[Linda Buquet]

You can ban the IP in your hosting panel. 1st check to see who it is though. Certain countries are notorious for doing bad stuff, so if I see something funny and it's from one of those countries I just ban it.

 

[999affiliates]

Add this to your .htaccess file to block those ips.

order allow,deny
deny from xxx.xx.x.x
deny from xxx.xx.x.x
allow from all

 

[Steve Morris]

I have banned the IP range that it was coming from

 

[MrCat]

I think something more underhand is going on. my thoughts are that someone is making a lot of automated queries to the search engine trying to make it look like my site is spamming. The logs show multiple hits from the same ip range for the same keyword with only one page loading

Why would someone do that? Did you outsource any of your SEO?