Thread: Gator Advertisements Targeted at YOUR SITE!

Dial-a-phone

asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...hone.co.uk

Date The UK

asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...etheuk.com

Loanspage.co.uk

asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...page.co.uk

Egg

asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...st=egg.com

BBC (bet you didn't know they carry adverts)

asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...=bbc.co.uk

Nice tool Clarke.....I've found one loyal affiliates site has been grasped by gator

The documentation on how gator targets ads is quite interesting too..
<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Some responses from Gator servers contain lists of keywords that often bear clear and recognizable relationships with the content available on the requested web site. For example, in response to a request for microsoft.com, Gator servers send the client a file that includes the plain text "scid=KB;en-us;q49500" -- recognizable, to experienced users of Microsoft's web site, as a reference to a particular technical article on Microsoft's site.[/quote]
I looked up Q49500 and it is a List of Antivirus Software Vendors. I didn't realise that Gator was targetted down to single pages that deep into a site <img src=http://smilies.networkessence.net/s/contrib/drowned/argue.gif ALT=":!">

Recent Searches : asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/gator-sites/show.asp

Clarke,

If your site is being targetted, how do you interpret it?

I've got everyone.net email on my site, which occasionally pops up the Gator install. Do you think this will give me a bad rap? I can't really do anything about it...

Most of my sites are showing as targetted.

I haven't really got a clue what this means though??????????

<em><strong>>If your site is being targetted, how do you interpret it?</strong></em>

My Interpretation would be, that if your site is showing Gator adverts then 1 of 3 things is going on. 1 someone might have paid them to be shown on your site. 2 Gator may have a high profit affiliate program in place for a rival. or 3 your site gets so much traffic from people that have Gator installed that when they look at the logs to see where people who have Gator installed visit and you rank high enough that they can't ignore showing adverts to Gator installed people when they visit your site.

But I don't really know the full ins and outs however I do know that if you promote Spybot security.kolla.de/ and Ad-Aware www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ to your user base then you won't have a big problem.

Best thing to do when promoting it is, explain it removes lots of pop-up adverts, makes there machine run faster, means quicker download of web pages and protects there online privacy and both programs are free!

and <a href="http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/gator-sites/test.asp?host=kelkoo.com" target="top">Kelkoo</a> too. Nasty!

Comet
asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...omet.co.uk

ebay
asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu...t=ebay.com

and they are targeting me

Gator is just a media thief in aligators clothing. There is nothing subtle about the company. We should feel the same way towards Gator as the Music industry felt towards Napster.

Can't one of the big media owners do something about them? I find it incredible that The IAB were unable to stop them!!!

Having looked at Gators defence in that article, it appears that they claim that users opt in to download the software. I don't ever remember opting in to be spammed to hell by them (like I did). What the IAB should be focusing on is how difficult it is for users to opt out. It took me about 3 months of trying before I finaly figured out how to get it off my machine (maybe i'm a bit dense) but this is what I suspect many internet users are also suffering from. Additionaly, I doubt that many Media owners would mind so much if Gator did a fair revenue share deal with the media owners that they jumped off the back of.

PitBoss <img src=http://smilies.networkessence.net/s/contrib/drowned/argue.gif ALT=":!">

Gator has blocked the tool so you can no longer pull live results. It still shows a cache of previous results.

For those of you that asked "what does it mean if I am being targeted?" It means Gator is stealing your hard earned traffic and sending it to one of your competitors. If you are paying for traffic from search engines Gator is also helping to waste your advertising dollars.

Example: You sell Blue Widgets. YOU build a site, YOU pay for hosting, YOU pay for advertising to get visitors to YOUR site to buy YOUR products! YOU buy an ad on Overture or Google featuring Blue Widgets. A surfer clicks YOUR ad to come to YOUR site. YOU get charged for the click. The prospective customer lands on YOUR site and you hope to sell one of YOUR products. The second they land on YOUR site Gator pops up a big window saying "buy Blue widgets HERE and advertises someone elses site and steals your traffic.

That's why it is called predatory advertising. In my mind, a brick and mortar analogy would be: If I owned a computer store and someone tresspassed onto MY property, dug a hole in MY entry way and put a huge billboard right in front of MY front door, so MY customers could not get in and the billboard said "For the best prices go to ABC computer store." That would be illegal. The fact that Gator continues to get away with it puzzles me.

I checked all the sites for affiliate programs I manage or consult for and thank God none of them is currently targeted. But Gator is only one of MANY predators that are out there doing similar types of traffic stealing.

Is there coding we can place on our site to prevent this?

How can we check if our "hard earned" visitor is affected?

Is there a guestimation to the % of users affected?


How alarming is the rate of increase?

This is all quite worrying

Is it mainly US users that are 'infected' by Gator or is it big in the UK too?

Also be warned - I've just noticed that they are advertising with Valueclick! If you display valueclick banners then you could be promoting Gator on your site!!

It's advertising a free tool to keep your clock accurate - if you download it you install Gator too!!

Nasty! The banner display alone trys to trigger a download!

A bit confused here - I think I get the concept of what Gator is doing with respect to Loanspage.co.uk (for example). Learned a long time ago that Gator is a nasty piece of work having discovered the parasitic way it was working on my PC (thank you Morpheus for putting it there).

I recommend <strong><span style="color:yellow;">SPYBOT - SEARCH AND DESTROY</span></strong> and <span style="color:yellow;"><strong>SPYWARE BLASTER</strong></span> to scan your PC of all parasites ... and then remove and block them from getting their nasties into your browser and PC again.

SpyBot: security.kolla.de/
Soyware Blaster: www.javacoolsoftware.com/...aster.html
<span style="color:#33FFFF;font-size:xx-small;"><em>(Later note - I just saw this had already been recommended.. sorry!)</em></span>

<span style="colorrange;"><strong>As for GATOR windows popping up over your site when you're loaded</strong></span>, how about trying to ensure that your site loads ... waits a bit and then pushes its way on top of other windows that appeared over you in the last few seconds? E.G.

_ _ _ _ <span style="color:#33FFFF;">setTimeout("window.focus(); ", 4000);</span>

... placed in script tags and maybe just above the closing /body tag?

<blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Don’t post the affiliates URLs please; just merchants or big sites, [/quote]Actually, that reads to me as quite insulting. An affiliate's URL is protected and a private note is recommended, but merchants' URLs are to be publically displayed and the operators are not to be advised? I understood that affiliates and merchants worked togther but that comments suggests a worrying divide to me.

Best wishes,
Dean