[Hidden-tech] Trying to figure out traffic spike

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Tue Feb 7 14:42:36 EST 2012


At Tue, 7 Feb 2012 08:39:28 -0500 gabe ripley <gabe at tattoonow.com> wrote:

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> hey folks,
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> We have had a recent traffic spike which was not unexpected as I made  
> a few somewhat significant changes two months ago as our traffic had  
> dropped over the years. We had on occasion done a million unique  
> visitors a month, but over the last 3-4 years our traffic had dropped  
> to about 150,000 uniques. the last week had seen our daily count rise  
> to about 15,000 (from 5k) and then last weekend we have broke 60,000  
> each day. yesterday was 82k uniques. What is curious is google  
> analytics says these new visitors are coming "directly" in, and they  
> are being delivered exclusively to 4 pages. Its a tad unnerving not  
> knowing where the visitors are coming from and the fact they go to  
> four pages exclusively (Id much rather a more event distribution),  
> they must be coming from a search engine I imagine? Anyone have any  
> similar experiences, or experience zeroing in on exactly where traffic  
> is coming in from? Its a great problem to have, to not understand  
> where zillions of people are coming from, but I want to understand so  
> I don't lose it again! It might be as easy as website history (over 10  
> years) and the tweaks I made, but its the not knowing the source is  
> killing me!!

If they are coming in 'directly' they are not coming from a search
engine. When google analytics says the source is "direct", that means
that the referer is blank.  This means one of these possiblities:

1) The visiter typed in the URL directly in the Location field in their
browser OR used a bookmarked URL OR copied and pasted a URL from say and
E-Mail.  Normal humans are most likely to be landing on your home page
and going from there.  Unless they have bookmarked an interier page it
is going to be rare that a normal human is going to type in some random
(long) URL, unless you sent out some E-Mail with this URL, in which case
people might be doing a copy-and-paste.

2) It is some sort of automated connection, typically a 'bot, either
'friendly' (eg googlebot), 'broken / unfriendly' (eg bingbot), or
'evil' (such as some nasty spambot, looking for E-Mail addresses or a
blog to spam or something like that).

Check the user agent (it is one of the display options for google
analytics).  Bingbot is *known* to go completely nutso and pound your
site 3 or 4 times *in a single second* -- this is unfriendly and can be
effectivly a DDoS attack -- Bingbot several times broke the session
table for a Joomla! site I host of and I had to hook up with Bing
webmaster tools and throttle Bingbot to about 25% of its 'normal'
crawling rate, even though it complained that it would not be able to
properly index the site (I'd rather not be in Bing's results that have
the site effectively down completely).  (I also set up a cron job to
repair the session table, in case Bingbot comes back.)

> 
> thanks in advance,
> gabe
> 
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Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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