Can some hits be deleted from stats?
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A weird thing happened to my blog on March 13. Instead of my normal 25 to 50 daily hits, the day’s total came in as 975! Of those, 906 came from one source: Yahoo Image Search. This had to be some sort of glitch or error, and it has distorted the graph of my stats to the point of absurdity.
I don’t need this gigantic number. I’d much rather be able to see the normal graphic pattern of my blog’s daily activity. Can WordPress delete those 906 hits from the record? I’d be very grateful!
Diane
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I’ll tag this thread for a Staff response. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and please be patient while waiting.
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Thanks, Timethief. I’ll be patient.
I haven’t seen your current photo before. Gorgeous hair!
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Thanks. No more pixie cut and no more hair coloring. I’m celebrating my gray hair and I’m growing it long.
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This was not a glitch. Most of the searches from Yahoo image search were looking for “skyscraper sandwich”, which referenced your post “Bread-and-Butter Pickles”. I did a test search for that term in Yahoo’s image search today and the Dagwood image from your post comes up on the first page of the image search results.
As we only report what happens on your blog, we really can’t control the behavior of what the average internet user searches for or how they may visit your site.
Here’s more information about your stats that might be useful:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/I hope that clarifies things!
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helper-heroponriki
Thank you for the quick response. But I guess I didn’t express myself clearly. Or using “glitch” was the wrong word. Believe me, I wasn’t blaming WordPress!
I discovered for myself that that was the image that caused all the hits. And of course I knew that WordPress only reports wht happens and can’t control internet users’ behavior.
What I’m asking is whether WordPress can go into my records for that day and delete all those hits — or even delete that entire day’s hits. Anything that will remove the extreme distortion they cause to the graph on the stats page! Can you please tell me if that is possible?
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It’s not a distortion.
You did in fact post the image.
The image was in fact indexed by search engines.
People using search engines did in fact click into the blog to view the image. -
I call it a distortion because it so changes the scale of the graph that the bars for many other days are barely visible. And that huge disproportion will be with me for the life of my blog.
Also, I find it hard to conceive of how 900 internet users would have clicked on that one insignificant image on one single day. Or why one user, either mistakenly or maliciously, would have clicked 900 times. I call that a distortion too.
I can understand that WordPress wouldn’t intervene to falsely improve a blog’s number of hits, but to charitably deduct some at the blogger’s request doesn’t seem such a bad thing, if it could be done. I’d do it myself if I could!
I have my answer from csonnek, though, and I have to accept it.
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Lots of people have experienced such quirks, folks finding something unusual and not central to your blog / site but getting a lot of hits via search engines.
Those hits may not be what we want to indicate the value / popularity/ usefulness of our site, may not even be related to the main topics we write about, may be annoying because they “skew” the stats in ways we are not willing to continue to write about (even though it was popular), but you can see that information in the wp.com stats.
Keep in mind that the number of hits is not the main reason you write / blog. An odd stat is something of interest, but not part of your reason to write.
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Interesting point, 1tess. I hadn’t realized this happened to others as well. I appreciate your letting me know it, and I certainly agree that hits aren’t my reason to write. Thank you!
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