Crowdflower.com sends spam traffic to your website

Have you ever noticed a spike in Referral traffic to your website? You probably got all excited thinking your website traffic is receiving a nice increase in traffic that will improve your website goals.  And then you examine your traffic analytics reports more closely to figure out where the spike came from. You discover that the traffic is coming from www.crowdflower.com.  :(

I examined the behavior of visitors from this domain and they don't do anything!! They mostly enter through the home page. They might visit one more page. They spend about 45 seconds on average on the site. Try to look at any of the many referring URLs and the pages won't load.

I looked up their street location using Google Satellite view.

2111 Mission Street, Suite 302, San Francisco, CA 94110

It looks like they are on the second floor of a dingy building in some dingy part of San Francisco.

They don't respond to my calls or email inquiries. I want to know who they are and why are they sending so much bogus traffic to my company website every month.  I have to filter this traffic from my monthly reports so they are not overinflated. The increase in traffic on the surface looks like I'm doing something wonderful to increase traffic. But, it's not legitimate quality traffic we care about, so I'm excluding it.

Maybe someone from Crowdflower will find this blog post and stop sending traffic to the site!

Comments

[Fraud Email Blog]

And there is still now way to stop these guys?

[Betsy Landon]

I did not engage Crowdflower to click on links in Google results to send bogus traffic to the site in question. Now, look at the notice in Google Webmaster Tools! I'm glad the Crowdflower traffic has stopped and I can ignore the message from Google Webmaster Tools.

Read the related article: http://www.betsylandon.com/aotm/2013/01/google-webmaster-tools-notice-when-crowdflower-clicks-stop.html

[Chris_Lu54]

Photo of Biewald and Van Pelt, the 2 whose crowdflower.com has been sending traffic to your page: [URL removed so as not to promote the photo of the guy sitting at a table of money drinking beer]

[Chris_Lu54]

Crowdflower has people do things like find email addresses, click on pages of Websites so Google will rank them higher, read tweets about people and report whether the tweet sentiments are positive or negative, etc.

Crowdflower workers are not just at the dingy California office you speak of. Most of them work from Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a job board.

Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt (Crowdflower) haven't paid workers minimum wage or overtime, and sometimes they haven't paid workers at all, so lawyers sued them last October, and the case is progressing.