Great Unexpected Results From Nowhere

Hello world!

This is my first post to this site using this alias.

To the point, a few weeks ago I setup a random domain which has never had a site on it. This domain has zero juice, zero recognition from anyone, it simply does not exist. I am pretty sure I am the original registrant for it as well. It should not be attracting anyone's attention. Follow me so far?

So I have been experimenting with different methods for collecting profile information, and this site is part of my test. It has a single page, with heavy images. It is a template landing page type of thing. It has one or two sentences on it, and an HTML input box and submit box. This is a simple, and not streamlined page.

I am in the middle of several projects ... who isn't ... and this being a side project of a side project, after getting the site up, I put it on a shelf. This being the Christmas season, my other more established businesses take my attention for now. I figure once I am fat and well rested sometime in the first quarter of 2018 I would go through my list of side-side projects and remember this one. Yeah, this is the neglected friend of the neglected child. So, imagine my surprise when my email inbox started receiving notifications that email addresses were being added to this site's database. (I have the site add email addresses to a mysql database, then send me an email notifying me of the insert.) I thought it was odd the first day. By the third day, I am at a complete loss as to why anyone would be submitting valid email addresses to this site!

This caught me so off-guard that I did not even have any analytics running on the site, and had to do some quick work of it on the first day of me receiving email addresses so I could start to get a better understanding of who was visiting the site.

It has been over a week now, and I am still getting around fifty to one-hundred emails added to this site daily.

Have you ever heard of anything like this? I am not complaining, but I just do not understand the how and why of it. Trust me, I would love to figure this out and duplicate it on other sites that I can better monetize! Let me know if you have any theories.

Mark Eternally

did someone misspell their advertising copy with YOUR url? you might just be that lucky bastard that someone poured advertising dollars for you lol

woahhhh thats awesome. i agree with @illuminateme thats the only reason i can think of. set up analytics and find out who your referral angel is

TWdesigns69 said:

woahhhh thats awesome. i agree with @illuminateme thats the only reason i can think of. set up analytics and find out who your referral angel is

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haha if it was DIRECT then someone PRINTED your domain somewhere! D'oh! better monetize the traffic before it's taken away... don't count on it lasting for long...

some poor marketing shmuck's head's gonna roll...

illuminateme said:

haha if it was DIRECT then someone PRINTED your domain somewhere! D'oh! better monetize the traffic before it's taken away... don't count on it lasting for long...

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This^. Also search on Twitter/Facebook, maybe somebody posted your domain by mistake instead of theirs , like it happened here

You're lucky man

Dante12 said:

This^. Also search on Twitter/Facebook, maybe somebody posted your domain by mistake instead of theirs , like it happened here

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OMG when you start to think equifax can't screw it up anymore than they already have....

I am using Google Analytics / Webmaster Tools to get an idea of what is happening, but more about that later.

Using numerous search engines, social media searches, and link checks, I cannot find a single link to this domain. Which somewhat puts a wall into the most likely scenario mentioned in this thread so far; that this domain is somehow being referenced by someone elses marketing efforts. Well, this does not seem to be the case.

Back to the analytics. I have more than triple checked my webpage source, and Google settings. Plot thickens ... there is zero traffic to this site.

Yep, you read that correctly. To be true, I can see my own visits to the site. When I remove my own traffic, this site is dead.

For every possible solution I can think of so far, I can follow each possibility down to a technical improbability of zero to too insanely small to realistically consider.

I just made a change that forces all traffic over to h-t-t-p-s. Not sure if that matters, but if e-mail addresses stop coming, I will turn that setting off and allow unencrypted h-t-t-p traffic to see if the e-mail fairy starts giving me addresses again.

My next step is to draft a simple e-mail and send it to a few of the collected e-mail addresses. In the e-mail I will ask them about how they heard of us and maybe offer them something for their feedback.

Any ideas what is happening here or perhaps some recommendations as to solving this?

Funny as a case.Maybe google is doing this ,who will know.........

So, on 14 DEC 2018, I forced all traffic to H-T-T-P-S. Magically, the e-mail fairy did not like this, and she stopped sending me e-mail addresses. Just a few minutes ago, I burned my S-S-L certificates for this site, and am allowing unencrypted traffic to go through. I am hoping this makes the e-mail fairy happy again, and she starts to sprinkle her craziness back onto this site.

This secure socket layer change though does add to the puzzle.

I am open to any ideas with regard to what the heck may be happening here.

How are you getting the emails? Is it a squeeze page where you are asking for emails? If you run Wordpress and have meta and subscriptions enabled and they are simply registering to your website and providing emails, then it may be as simple as bot traffic. Especially seeing as you said they are not registering in analytics. Otherwise you should look at cpanel awstats and find out what this traffic is, or you could watch it live with a plugin like Wordfence and look up the ips to try to find out what's going on.

This is a page I built. I started with a blank text file. It is PHP inside of an HTML file, with .htaccess settings made to make the PHP in HTML work. There is a MySQL database with a dedicated database, and single table with just enough fields to handle the e-mail address user input. The entire site is a single page. The page has a Google Analytics tag entry (Analytics & Webmaster Tools), CSS calls, favicon, HTML, and some javascript (rotates the background image). The actual words on the page consists of one header entry with two words in it, then one small sentence with eighteen words in it. After the small sentence there is a single input box, with autofocus set, and a single submit button. The footer just has the year, a copyright symbol, and the website name. The form calls itself, so the PHP does some checks to check the status of the form entries, or lack thereof. With every successful email address submission to the database (validation which includes checking for duplicates), the page displays, "Thank You!" to the user and immediately emails one of my email addresses I am using for this site. So, I am notified, in near-real-time, with every successful form submission. Honestly, this is a very simple page.

No Wordpress.
No Plugins.

I did NOT have the hosts' site logging active. Thank you for that recommendation! It is now active, and I am waiting for some entries before I check the stats.

To build onto my previous posts in this thread, after I removed the HTTPS requirement/redirection, and allowed unencrypted traffic, I began to receive email addresses again.

Of course I am happy the email fairy is hooking me up, but I would really like to know why and how so I can turn this into a system, preferably a system I can monetize.

I really do not care about the http/s trafic, if the landing page has a decent offer and no bs ( for users) and is very clean ( for bots) a normal user will, without a doupt, leave the email. But yea... some poor orm emploie will louse his job. If not and all is green and no money for marcketing has been spent, congratulations, you just made the famous, elusive, pink dragon discovery. A site that went viral naturaly, BHW's wet dream, and mine aswell.

Just an update to this thread. This domain of mine is STILL bringing in e-mail addresses, with zero traffic. (I can see my own test traffic, but nothing else.) This may turn into a magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow once I have a decent size list.

You could ask a few subscribers about your site, if they used the form or not, just to solve the mystery.

Another update on this ...
It seems that somewhere, my site is being placed in someone's iframe or such, as I can see a lot of traffic from one or two IP addresses. When I test the e-mails, the responses are from seemingly legitimate people interested in the site. When I ask them about how they found my site, they have no idea what I am talking about, but they say they were using other sites. Yeah, weird.
Weird or not, I am not going to upset this little silver mine. It is still producing.

Wow

Mark Eternally said:

Another update on this ...
It seems that somewhere, my site is being placed in someone's iframe or such, as I can see a lot of traffic from one or two IP addresses. When I test the e-mails, the responses are from seemingly legitimate people interested in the site. When I ask them about how they found my site, they have no idea what I am talking about, but they say they were using other sites. Yeah, weird.
Weird or not, I am not going to upset this little silver mine. It is still producing.

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So you see the traffic now in your analytics?

Have you made any profit?