Dont know where increased hits coming from

@ketancoOct 29.2009

Hello,
In the recent couple weeks, the unique hits I am getting increased by almost 100%, from around 150 a day to almost 300 a day. I am not complaining but I dont have any idea where they are coming from. I was just updating my site as usual and I checked the site statistics and backlinks and did not see anything out of ordinary or added. Any ideas how did this happen?

to post a comment

SEO

17 Comments(s) _↴

@opifexOct 30.2009 — #Is something in your site "seasonal" content? Holidays can always affect you. Look at the content of the most visited pages and any new keywords being used to find you... that should give you a clue.

@ketancoauthorOct 30.2009 — #no nothing seasonal. and as far as keywords, i am not yet in the first results for the keywords I wanted, (except when you combine two words but those visits are too few). The funny thing is, the google adwords income did not increase in the same proportion. So I am assuming that most of the new visit are form bots right?

One more related question: When a webmaster says "i have so many unique hits per month" would these unique hits include the possible bots visiting the site like in my case? Or how can someone know people hits or bot hits to a site?

@svidgenOct 30.2009 — #When a webmaster says "i have so many unique hits per month" would these unique hits include the possible bots visiting the site like in my case?[/QUOTE]
Depends on the webmaster. In my humblest of opinions, "unique hits" is a meaningless phrase. Measuring "hits" in general is pretty meaningless--a "hit" is just an HTTP request, which includes images, scripts, and stylesheets. Perhaps the webmaster meant to say "unique visitors."

@ketancoauthorOct 30.2009 — #but how does he know how many of unique visitors are visitors and how many are bots?

@ptejadaNov 05.2009 — #If he uses Google Analytics he will know the source of the traffic, if he is not using Google Analytics he should start installing it right now.

@ketancoauthorNov 05.2009 — #okay i have google analytics, and can not see which hits are bots and which hits are real people... how or where to see them?

@ptejadaNov 05.2009 — #I you just made your Google Analytics your past traffic is not going to be there of course.

Otherwise,

Enter to your Google Analytics account

Click View Report for the site

Click Traffic Source on the left panel

Under Traffic Source in left panel click 'All Traffic Source'

You should see line Chart and list of your traffic source as well as the amount of traffic form each source. You should be able to figure out which are bots.

Also take a look at the unique Visitors Overview.

@ketancoauthorNov 05.2009 — #sure i have it for a long time and I looked at it. okay, the majority of them (like 60&#37? is direct traffic/none with average page visit of 1.13 pages and a visit length of 16 seconds with a bounce rate of 89%. I guess the majority of these would be defined as bots correct? why might I have so many direct visits any ideas?

@ptejadaNov 06.2009 — #I don't know if Google analytics count bots as visits. Direct traffic can mean a lot of things and not just bots; User may have your site bookmarked, Has a shortcut on desktop, form browser history and lot more. Trust me, no bot will take 16 seconds on your site.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools for any personal web developer, and its surprisingly free. Analytics has a lot of useful information, for example there is section named 'Length of visits' in Visitors > User Loyalty > Length of Visit

Here you can see the percentage of the visits length. If Analytics count bots visits then this visits should be in the range of 0-10 seconds. If more than 40% of visits are 0-10 seconds you have a problem either way; too much bots crawling your site or your content is not impressing your visitors.

My site is a few months old, and 68% of my traffic is direct and i have decent stats when it comes to unique visitors and their visit length. With 1,722 visits and 905 Unique visitors. If you do the math more then 60% of my direct traffic cant bet bots.

Direct Traffic Isn't bad at all.

@ketancoauthorNov 06.2009 — #Thanks for the info I appreciate it. By the way, how were you able to generate such a big number of unique hits (I am assuming you are saying 905/day) in just a few months?

@ptejadaNov 06.2009 — #Thanks for the info I appreciate it. By the way, how were you able to generate such a big number of unique hits (I am assuming you are saying 905/day) in just a few months?[/QUOTE]
Nah...jeje, I wish. I get am average of 55 visits per day. 905 is the overall number of unique visitors. The Overall site Visits is 5,000+, so you can assume that i have some Returning visitors of those 905 Unique Visitors.

@svidgenNov 06.2009 — #My site is a few months old, and 68% of my traffic is direct and i have decent stats when it comes to unique visitors and their visit length. With 1,722 visits and 905 Unique visitors. If you do the math more then 60% of my direct traffic cant bet bots.[/QUOTE]
Google Analytics collects its data via JavaScript. Bots won't run it, and neither will 1 to 10% of your visitors (depending on your audience).

Hopefully, we won't see the day when bots start running JavaScripts and filling out forms ... they haven't started doing this yet, have they?

@ptejadaNov 06.2009 — #Google Analytics collects its data via JavaScript. Bots won't run it, and neither will 1 to 10% of your visitors (depending on your audience).

Hopefully, we won't see the day when bots start running JavaScripts and filling out forms ... they haven't started doing this yet, have they?[/QUOTE]
I'm Afraid i believe they do, Before i had bots registering into my forums and even posting advertisements in my forums. And i haven't got one of those in months since i implemented an anti-bot system in the registration form. Incredibly the bots were able to decrypt the captcha image and register.WOW. i know...

@svidgenNov 06.2009 — #Ah yes. I wasn't even thinking of that type of bot ... sorry. I had my head stuck on legitimate bots (crawlers). If there is a way to rule out bot-generated requests, I'm confident that Google Analytics has integrated that logic. And I am still pretty confident that most bots will not effectively run JavaScript--but I would be interested in performing an experiment if I can get some participation.

... Basically, I'd need some help getting inbound links to a set of test pages, from which I we could present forms and scripts in a few different ways. I think that within a few weeks to a few months, we could see "exactly" what capabilities the typical bot has--possibly see a count or percentage of how many bots have which capabilities and so forth.

Obviously, if I were to host this, I'd receive the slight benefit of increasing visibility for my domain (svidgen.com). If folks are OK with that, I'd be interested in a project like this.

Anyone be interested?

@ketancoauthorNov 06.2009 — #I'm Afraid i believe they do, Before i had bots registering into my forums and even posting advertisements in my forums. And i haven't got one of those in months since i implemented an anti-bot system in the registration form. Incredibly the bots were able to decrypt the captcha image and register.WOW. i know...[/QUOTE] I recommend using random question and answer. I do not use captcha at all in my webiste's comment section for news entries. I am afraid, the AI has now solved to captcha thing. If we still follow that route, we will be upto a point that there will be images that no human can solve but only bots.. However if you use random question and answering, you get no bots pass those tests - yet... For example, in the forums section of my site, I had dozens of bot registrations everyday. Once I started to implement question and answering, it stopped suddenly with no more bots at all.

@ptejadaNov 06.2009 — #This Test is not this complicated. There is also a tool from Google called Webmaster Tools. You can actually fetch any page on your domain as a Googlebot and see it as as Googlebot sees it.

So you can make your test page and include a javascript that adds something to the page (Text Preferably ). Fetch this page as a Googlebot and if you see the script did run and returned what it was suppose to return.

There is a quick test you can do yourself to prove if bots trigger JavaScript.

@ptejadaNov 06.2009 — #I recommend using random question and answer. I do not use captcha at all in my webiste's comment section for news entries. I am afraid, the AI has now solved to captcha thing. If we still follow that route, we will be upto a point that there will be images that no human can solve but only bots.. However if you use random question and answering, you get no bots pass those tests - yet... For example, in the forums section of my site, I had dozens of bot registrations everyday. Once I started to implement question and answering, it stopped suddenly with no more bots at all.[/QUOTE]

Yes, that is what i use now... Since my site authentication is based on my PHPBB forum i got myself a PHPBB mod that did just that and never got those nasty bots ever since. ?

Also in #SEO _↴

How do search engines handle frames?Density Checker bottom text display when mouseover a link

Success!

Help @ketanco spread the word by sharing this article on Twitter...

Tweet This

Dont know where increased hits coming from

17 Comments(s) _↴

Also in #SEO _↴

Success!

Social

Version

Dont know where increased hits coming from

17 Comments(s) ↴

Also in #SEO ↴

Success!

The web is an endless sea of information. Don't miss the boat... Subscribe!

Social

Version

17 Comments(s) _↴

Also in #SEO _↴