:(Įither way - legitimate traffic or not - I think I overreacted by suspending the site. But by then, the traffic surge had dropped to a trickle. They told me I could put my AdSense ads back on and that they would be 'monitoring' things closely. When I finally heard back from Google, it sounded like they were considering the traffic to be legitimate, and the clicks and earnings are still showing in my account. I unsuspended the site the next day, but removed the AdSense blocks from the page that was getting all the traffic. (Which form, by the way, is difficult to find if you don't have it bookmarked.)īut in addition to panicking and reporting, I also suspended the site. I panicked! I reported the unusual activity to Google, of course, using their form.

It sure appeared to be real traffic from real people, but it was something like 1,000 times the usual amount of traffic to that site, in just 2 hours. And the CTR on the ads was around 5% - also perfectly within the normal range. But the traffic was coming in from all different IP addresses, different hosts, from different parts of the country, and with the normal and expected distribution of operating systems and user-agents. This was a search phrase that normally brings only a few visits per month. When I checked the log (saving it to my local machine if needed), I found that all, literally all, of the traffic was coming in via AOL search from one particular search phrase which brought up an image on the site, which AOL displays as a a thumbnail above the normal search results.

On investigating, I found that a small site that usually get no more than 50 to 100 page views a day was suddenly getting hundreds of visits in an inexplicable surge. A couple of days ago, I saw my AdSense earnings shoot way up in a short time span.

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