I wanted to give everyone an early heads up that we are getting close to rolling out additional filtering features within IZEARanks. Over the past several months we have noticed a growing number of bloggers using click farms, bots and pop-unders to generate what looks like a large amount of pageviews on their blog. This traffic is extremely low quality and paints an inaccurate picture of the blogs true reach. It also hurts our advertisers and bloggers with legitimate traffic.
I want to be clear that we will not be filtering out traditional ad buys or other types of traffic. What we are filtering is traffic that we can demonstrate adds little to no value based the macro view of all traffic to blogs in our network, over months of examination. This traffic will simply be excluded from your pageview and visitor counts.
I never like putting things like this in place. It’s unfortunate that people will always try to abuse any system where money or status is involved. However, this practice is so blatant that it absolutely must be addressed for the good of our community.
What do we consider garbage? Here are a few things we look for:
– Average time spent on site
– IP addresses of traffic
– Origin of traffic
– Service provider of traffic
– Method of traffic generation
Generally speaking if you are buying “10,000 clicks for $9.95” chances are that traffic won’t be registered through IZEARanks. Look at your own analytics software. Are the people coming from the program you participate in leaving as soon as they get there? Traffic from that program will likely be excluded if that is the norm across the whole network.
We are not targeting specific blogs, rather we are targeting the sources that inflate bloggers numbers.
