Has Anyone Else Noticed These Slick Bastards?

Analytics Spam

Any good SEO monitors his/her traffic sources. Every once and awhile you glean some incite as to the success or failure of your link building campaigns. Over the last few days I have noticed “traffic” from two referring sites.

www.tinyurl.com/ForexTradingSystems

AND

www.tinyurl.com/UnlimitedHostingService

These slick bastards are creating traffic by somehow clicking sites getting their tinyUrl links to show up on Google Analytics. You, being the good steward of your site, click the link where you get pitched on what ever they are pitching that day.

These referring site links have showed up on over 10 my sites and or client sites. I would bet that they are generating a crud-ton of traffic this way. As a programmer I could probably figure out how to do this but I think I will stick to more traditional SEO.

By Clicking the below link you will be adding this site to their referring sites list on their analytics account.

http://tinyurl.com/Youslickbastards

I can’t be the first to notice this or am I just late to the party.

Cheers,
Scott

Update

I emailed Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org fame and he informed me that I am 4 years late and a dollar short.

My Email to Rand,
Did I just discover a new type of spam or am I just late to the party?

Rands Reply,
Not new – been around since before search engines, actually (because it was an easy way to get traffic in the early days of the web).