secretcorner.com

[airdick]

For the 24 hour period ending 4am EDT June 13 one of my domains had 461 hits with a referer from Secretcorner. Of the 461 hits 460 were from 8 unique IP addresses:


110 66.119.33.185 proxyche01.ia4.marketscore.com
41 66.119.33.186 proxyche02.ia4.marketscore.com
22 66.119.33.187 proxyche03.ia4.marketscore.com
58 66.119.33.188 proxyche04.ia4.marketscore.com
87 66.119.34.57 proxyche01.ia2.marketscore.com
63 66.119.34.58 proxyche02.ia2.marketscore.com
19 66.119.34.59 proxyche03.ia2.marketscore.com
60 66.119.34.60 proxyche04.ia2.marketscore.com

Here is what a Google search says about Marketscore:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...&q=marketscore

Here is what Marketscore says about themselves:

http://www.marketscore.com/e/faq.asp

It doesn't look like any of the hits that came from Secretcorner ever went any further than just requesting my warning pages. The User-agent changes as I would expect if normal surfers are hitting my sites(example: "Mozilla/4.0 (comp
atible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)")

I have 43 other hits from addresses matching ^66.119.3 in my log and these appear to represent visits from 15 other tgp/linklists/search engines.

I can think of a few possibilties to explain the Secretcorner hits-

1. Marketscore's caching engine could be periodically refreshing or pre-fetching cache, although if this were the case the User-Agent should be consistent.

2. Secretcorner could be buying or trading for traffic from a source that uses Marketscore's application to proxy a hitbot.

3. Secretcorner could be buying or trading for traffic that is actually generated on the client by Marketscore's application. In browsing around on Google I wasn't able to determine if Marketscore's client-side application actually runs as adware that redirects and generates traffic, or just logs surfing habits to resell as market research.

I want to stress that I don't think any of this is necessarily indicative of any deception on the part of Secretcorner. Maybe I'm naive, but I can't think of any scenario where it would be to a linklist's advantage to purposefully send fake traffic to submitters. Wouldn't the money and effort would be better spent in other areas?