Adhood.com Beats Google, Facebook and Twitter

Adhood… who? That’s what we thought when our software developer working the on Majestic Million project noticed adhood.com rapidly advancing up the ranks of well established domains. Today they have become #1 .COM by number of referring domains.

We were surprised as much as you are now! We tend to pay attention to artifacts like this just in case something may have gone wrong, so we decided to investigate. The first action was to check the more detailed statistics available in our Site Explorer tool:

Two things looked unexpected: a very small number of referring IP addresses and very high number of FRAME link types. The Link velocity shown in charts was also very high, one potential cause of an effect such as this would be expected if a sites backlinks appeared more or less at the same time on a very large number of domains.

Returning to this domain, our next step was to look at most linked to top pages:

The top 2 links caught our attention – they appear to be very similar to Alexa’s widgets –

Badges and widgets such as these are pretty common, in fact we’ve launched our own fine range, but we were curious – how could these get linked to so heavily in such a short time frame?

This was the time for proper detailed analysis – so we created an Advanced Report for the domain in question and we could quickly see that 99% of linking domains are .TVs such as http://united-kingdom.co.tv. We performed a quick visual check of the HTML code on this page, which suggested that our bot had picked up the data correctly:

<iframe src=”http://www.adhood.com/alexa_widget_0.html” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”></iframe>

Note that the source of the frame is one of the top widget pages on adhood.com. Naturally – we seek third party verification when researching potential anomalies in our data set, and interestingly Quantcast shows increase in traffic as well.

In conclusion…

Majestic Million allows users to discover new interesting domains, which can then be researched further using our other tools such as Site Explorer to help analyze data in depth.

We will finish with the thought that the internet is an interesting place more than capable of throwing up the occasional surprise and innovation.

Back