# Did SEO / fake traffic gang get put offline?



## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

Was cruising around doing my usual research.   Noticed a weird graph for ColoCrossing.. so I went looking at the other big fish in the same tank.. found a couple of the other main players with the same oddness.

These are current and from Alexa:

*ColoCrossing -*







*ServerMania -*
 






*Quadranet -*






Pretty strange massive dip for all three of them.. unless they all had a mass outage (sincerely doubt it) or Alexa stopped counting right just for them (other data elsewhere seems fine) or the later, paid SEO, traffic generation went offline.

Supposedly, an outfit ran out of Burst.net went offline with recent Burst crapola part two...

Yeah I know Alexa isn't the all knowing and entirely what to measure your pound of flesh with... But it is indeed something, often referred to by CC and well, damn strange on this one...


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## AThomasHowe (Jul 1, 2014)

What are the graphs? Traffic in or out? In I assume being Alexa... if it's just inbound for the tail end of this month could it be to do with Cloudflare's problems the past few days?

I am probably wrong just an idea.


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## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

Open to ideas @AThomasHowe... The Cloudflare problem(s) - can you point me to the post mortem or mentions of the problems?

Alexa lingers days behind so these dips were likely last week.


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## rds100 (Jul 1, 2014)

What does the graph show for some other unrelated sites? If it similar, or not?


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## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

PS: The graphs are the main, first up top graphs on Alexa:



> *Alexa Traffic Ranks*
> How is this site ranked relative to other sites?


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## Nett (Jul 1, 2014)

Summer hosts are coming.


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## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

rds100 said:


> What does the graph show for some other unrelated sites? If it similar, or not?


Other sites I checked, including vpsBoard, LEB, LET, slew of CC house providers, etc. do not show the graph dip.. I also looked at other busy sites in and out of the industry and didn't notice this.


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## AThomasHowe (Jul 1, 2014)

drmike said:


> Open to ideas @AThomasHowe... The Cloudflare problem(s) - can you point me to the post mortem or mentions of the problems?
> 
> Alexa lingers days behind so these dips were likely last week.


Yeah there's a bit on their twitter about it, if you look AMS has been particularly targeted the past few days, has made browsing some sites from the UK *very* bad.

https://twitter.com/CloudFlareSys

There's a pretty big attack going on right now which is slowing down LET and stuff for half the EU.


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## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

Well the CloudFlare beatdown is very interesting.

I just went and looked at the current IP information for CC, Quadra and ServerMania...  All three of them, at least at current are direct serving their own sites from their own IP space, no Cloudflare in the mix.

Doesn't mean they haven't been hiding behind CF in past week...  So yes, possibility perhaps of some relationship... Can't be ruled out yet.


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## drmike (Jul 1, 2014)

So.... Looked at Lowendbox and Lowendtalk, both which have a good long history of fronting with CloudFlare....

Currently, both are hiding behind CF.  Can't say they have been behind such every day all day recently.

Looking at their Alexa graphs, I see absolutely no massive decline like the others.


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## AThomasHowe (Jul 1, 2014)

Yeah it's probably not given the LET thing, just a thought.

Interesting, I wonder what it is. The other reason cloud flare came to mind is because that's such a huge dip in a short time it does look like outages.


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## AuroraZero (Jul 1, 2014)

LET was not hiding behind CF yesterday, or I should say if it was it was not noticeable. I had an error with the site and it came up with the LET error page and not the usual CF page. So it may have been hiding behind it but it was a normal LET error.


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## AThomasHowe (Jul 1, 2014)

AuroraZero said:


> LET was not hiding behind CF yesterday, or I should say if it was it was not noticeable. I had an error with the site and it came up with the LET error page and not the usual CF page. So it may have been hiding behind it but it was a normal LET error.


That was another issue. It was definitely behind CF yesterday as I experienced the AMS issues.

I think it's been behind CF for a while now, probably at least since start of 2014.


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## eddynetweb (Jul 1, 2014)

Might have they disabled CloudFlare due to the slowdown in the recent days?


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## drmike (Jul 3, 2014)

I think there is more to this...

I've been keeping an eye on these folks and the graphs... better views here:

*Colocrossing:*






*Servermania:*






*Quadranet:*






On all three we see a drop starting on the 22-24th.  23rd is the date to cover all.

The graph extends or seems to until June 30th...

Servermania was the only one to "rebound" and had 4 days of decreases in rank/traffic.

Some other notes:

Servermania has had a BIG run up in traffic/rank. Started July 2013:






Colocrossing has a similar run up that started mid year 2012 to third quarter 2012....

I don't think these drop offs are Cloudflare related since we have a date of the 23rd of June as the event date (with assumption that such is actual date of the traffic and not just the date of their reporting).


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## Hxxx (Jul 3, 2014)

lol ^

You know there is always History Channel, AMC, CW, plenty plenty.


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## Francisco (Jul 3, 2014)

When did Burstnet go dark?

Given the sharp declines I wouldn't doubt Burst had a lot of traffic generators/alexa bots.

A few years ago they had more than a few /20's and /19's listed for spam so it goes hand

in hand.

Francisco


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

I am severely leaning towards the plummet in traffic/rank at CC being due to spam/comment spam gang being put offline at Burst...

Look at this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fUaTWn2HTnAJ:ejournal.undiksha.ac.id/index.php/JPTK/article/view/31+&cd=33&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

CTRL-F to search for: colocrossing

Note, right under them is their sidekick Hudson Valley Host....

There are lots more of these out there / were.


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

Also of interest is Google...

https://www.google.ca/?q=%22http:%2F%2Fwww.colocrossing.com%22&gws_rd=ssl#q=%22http:%2F%2Fwww.colocrossing.com%22

Returns: About 108,000 results

Start leafing through the pages in order...

When you get to page #6 you get this:




*Page 6 of 53 results** (0.34 seconds) *

 

So it goes down from 108k to 53 ....


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

And this is damn funny...

https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&gws_rd=ssl#q=%22http:%2F%2Fquadranet.com%22

Give you: About 159,000 results  (0.30 seconds)

Page through the results.... Once you get to Page #8 of results, you see:

*Page 8 of 78 results (0.53 seconds*

So 159k results now down to 78?


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

The very same Google effect happens for Hudsonvalleyhost.com...

I either found a Google bug (possible) or some Google feature assumed to be based on Site Rank/PageRank where it truncates search results heap.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 8, 2014)

It's an 'intentional bug' - https://support.google.com/gsa/answer/2672285?hl=en


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

I just through that parameter on the end Ald, and no change...

*rc=1* = the URL parameter....


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## Aldryic C'boas (Jul 8, 2014)

Heh, guess they FUBAR'd it again.  I remember reading a write-up about Google and "padded estimates" awhile back that had a really nice breakdown of what was going on - but damned if I can find it now.  It's not a new issue by any means;  they've been half-assing figures for years.


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## drmike (Jul 8, 2014)

My farking typos make me lol afterwards.. through.... threw your moron. I threw that parameter on the end and no change...

But what's wonky is the count different - like 100k, down to 50-70....

Fun seeing CC spamming their own links all over... totally off topic, spam.... Poetic...


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