Traffic without links?
 

I'm no longer sending traffic from my site to most of the sponsor programs I belong to, but I'm still seeing quite a lot of traffic reaching those sponsors, even though I took their links down several days ago.

I'm even generating signups from these now non-existent links!

I'm *guessing* that somehow one or more search engines have spidered my site and picked up on the links with my referral codes in them, and now people are going via the SEs to the sponsor sites via a link with my code in them.

Have you ever had the same thing happen to you?

Is this a bad thing? (You may think "What a ridiculous question, asking if free signups are a bad thing" but my worry is that the sponsors will somehow think I'm cheating them if they can't see their links on my site)

Thanks in advance for all constructive feedback!

That happened to me on Google, when using 'sybian videos' as a search phrase.. I had the no. 1 spot, but it was my cdgirls account link instead of my site that contained the link.. It's gone now, but I still have the no. 4 spot for my 4hourvideos.com site, but I have sybian video page redirected to my leglink.com site..

Sooo.. yep .. it do happen...

No.. what happened is.. ISPs have cached your site.

To save on bandwidth, ISPs use transparent proxys. Sites visited from say, AOL, are cached locally on the AOL network, and flushed depending on 1) your headers 2) a default setting at the ISP (1 week, 2 weeks).

The best way to prevent this is to put a meta nocache tag in your header.

One way to make it go away is to take down your site for a day. It will automatically flush most caches.

Both things have happened to me.

I have one sponsor that I only make sales through spiders picking up my links.

This first happened to me over a year ago when Google had my amazon links for a site that no longer existed.

This will only last about a month after you take the site down - at least for google.

The proxy thing I have noticed as well. Usually - even if you have downtime - you will still see hits recorded. AOL and a lot of other ISPs do this.

Adding the meta non cache header DOES NOT work for aol however. You have to put it in the HTTP headers.

This doesn't work for every sponsor - and it doesn' seem to work well for amazon anymore.

Thanks for the info - reassuring to see others have had the same experience. I figure it MUST be spider-related since I'm getting sales off links that were only listed in a MEGA link page I made of all the sponsor sites I was signed up with, something like 400+ sites on one big page...

That page got practically ZERO traffic on my site and has now been gone for a week, yet (across all sponsors) I'm seeing right now something like 200-300 visitors a day to the various links that used to be on it!

More importantly, I'm still making a couple of sales a day - WOW!

Am I reading this right?

Your sales just started when you took da shit down?

Hmm now there's a bandwidth saver for ya! :winkwink:

CC

No, the sales started AFTER I took the stuff down. I guess there's a lag between pages being spidered and SEs actually updating their databases.