Cheating top 100 list type sites can be very profitable especially in an industry where website traffic has a high value such as the gaming industry. In August 2000 we decided to do a study on how easy it was to cheat the popular gambling top lists. We noticed that several sites trying to cheat our list were easily attaining substantial positions on other sites. There are several methods of cheating used to generate fake traffic which is counted by the victims top 100 list script as unique hits. Sometimes the cheater will simply click on his or her own links over and over and or have all of his or her employees do this as well.
Some cheaters have custom software designed especially to generate false hits.
Since most first and second generation top 100 list scripts use the IP address to determine a unique hit, many cheaters will use a dialup account to attain a new IP address for each hit. We used the following method to cheat several popular top 100 lists by generating false hits. First we downloaded and installed the popular macro program called Macro Express . Next we recorded a macro to click through each of our victims links. We also used the Macro Express handy dial up feature to hang up and redial a new ISP connection after each loop so that we automatically obtain a new IP address.