Lijit Uncovers a Douche Bag
This afternoon, I am sitting with a good friend of mine, Jim Turner, at The Cup in Boulder, CO. We were talking about Lijit as we often do, and I asked him if he saw that the top search on his blog was “social media douchebag.”
Laughing, he said that he hadnt, and wondered aloud who would have done such a thing.
“Have you checked your Lijit stats?” I replied. “After all you can see where the searches have come from.”
You can see from the popular searches section that “social media …” is the top search. This search, when clicked on is “social media douchebag.”
There are a couple of searches lower down, that start with “Jim Turner …” that are just as, well, flattering.
So, the question became, who would do such a thing? Has Jim pissed off the wrong person? Is he really a social media douche bag? (A search returns no results on his blog, so at least he doesnt consider himself one.)
This began our Sherlock Holmes-ian effort to determine who would want the number one search result on Jim Turner’s blog to be “social media douche bag.”
The next thing we took a look at was his Lijit search stats.
Its easy to see that most of the last searches are for “social media douchebag,” with many of them coming at the same time. Clearly this was the act of one bandit.
So where did these searches come from? It appears that the majority of them came from Boulder, CO.
Is it true? Could the culprit be someone that Jim knows? Someone in our own backyard?
The plot thickens…
How do find that one person in Boulder, CO?
Well, the best bet we had was to check Jim’s MyBlogLog widget. In the list of folks on his widget, only one was from Boulder.
Was this the villian? Is the person who wanted to see if Jim Turner was a “social media douche bag”? All the circumstantial evidence certainly points in that direction. If it is this person, then its just too bad that Lijit’s stats are just that good.
UPDATE: The person pictured on Jim’s MyBlogLog contacted me and professed his innocence. First, let me say I wasnt accusing him specifically (its circumstantial at best). Its possible that someone without a MyBlogLog login did it, and the person above got caught in the crossfire. Let me also say, that I am certain that while Jim Turner may be a douche bag, he is certainly not a social media douche bag, as there are several other folks that own that title.
Popularity: 10% [?]
At least they could have spelled my name correctly now I’m gonna lose all that Google juice.
Oh Snap!
You know though, the perp could be a non-myyahoolog user and not show up in myyahoolog at all.
Wow. Checking my lijit stats now….and shaking my head
@jenn yes that is a possibility. But it wouldnt have been so funny then.
@queenofspain the searches for red wings suck were me.
Maybe this is common Lijit knowledge, but this post got me thinking. Is there a way for a publisher to manually remove terms from the ‘Popular Results’ to avoid something like this? Or does Lijit have a way to filter repetitive searches from the same IP to prevent it from becoming popular from only one user’s searches?
@seth yes, on your profile page you can delete any result from the popular results cloud. As we get deeper into monetization, we will continue to improve our click fraud detection. Right now, multiple searches from the same IP are possible, we just need to determine time frame and number of repetitions.