FAKE stats?!

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  bigredoh · Member · Mar 11, 2009 at 9:14 pm

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  for http://cornellreview.wordpress.com/

  Our blog, the Cornell Insider, is a daily updated news blog for Cornell students, alumni, and just about any1 interested. Our blog has been steadily getting anywhere from 100-200 views a day, and our biggest day was about a month ago when views hit 700 in one day, when we broke a big story.

  HOWEVER!

  We recently also had a popular story, but the amount of views we are getting seems unrealistic. In a jump up from the daily 100, we received about 10,000 views in a two-day span! Now while I would like to think these are all legitimate views, I can’t help but wonder if this is not the case. For example, today we have about 3,500 views. What doesn’t make since, though is that only about 90 OF THESE VIEWS ARE BEING traced back to an actual referrer! And only about 110 POSTS have been viewed on their own pages.

  So, my question is: are a lot of our views coming from spam bots and essentially ‘fake’ views, or was this post that popular that it brought such a tremendous disproportionate amount of daily views? (Also, our # of spam comments for each view was not affected..).

  Can somebody help us get to the bottom of this please?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  tellyworth · Staff · Mar 11, 2009 at 10:39 pm

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  The extra views are real. It’s common to see this kind of pattern when you’re linked from a popular blog.

  You get more views than expected because some of the people who read your post stick around and click on posts and pages on your blog; some will post a comment and then come back multiple times to check for new comments and reply; others will visit your page from a forwarded email, RSS reader or other source that doesn’t always leave a referrer.

  The WordPress stats system is designed to ignore hits from spambots and scripts.