Stats Suddenly Changed – Visitors View One Image Each Now
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Hi. I have a photography page, with various photo galleries. Recently, my stats dramatically changed. Each visitor used to visit an average of 5 or so images/pages and now it’s almost exactly one visit per visitor, with almost no referrers, as well. Many of the images they visit are pretty buried in a gallery and there is no reasonable way a person could navigate to that one image without at least being in the gallery first (thus, as least 2 hits per visitor).
Is there any way to determine if this is some kind of automated/bot action?? What else might lead to this? Do I need to worry about any kind of new site security measures?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there, it could be that they are finding them via Google Images. You might try searching for the file name of one of the images, or possibly by the title or alt tag if you have added one to the image and see what comes up.
As far as security goes, about all you need to do is what is suggested in this How You Can Protect Your Site and Your Data on our Security support page.
If you can give me a link to one of the photos, that you have seen getting the hits, I can look into it for you.
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Thank you for your reply, security info, and ideas. I did a Google search for a number of them but only found my posts, so at least I don’t see that they are stolen and reposted. Otherwise, the links and file names are are varying, but not easy things like newenglandbarn.jpg or anything like that. Here’s one image that seems randomly viewed, though, for giggles: https://rootsandtwigsphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/dsc_8123_lr960.jpg
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I did a Google search for a number of them but only found my posts
We’re not speaking of the posts, but people are finding the images themselves in Google. When Google indexes a post you publish, it also separately indexes all images appearing in that post. It then uses an algorithm to identify the content of the picture and assigns key words, and if someone does a Google Image search, not a regular web search, it can return the images themselves as search results. You don’t even have to have a descriptive title or alt-tag on the image – Google has become smart enough to add key words to images themselves.
If someone clicks such an image search result to view just the image, it would result in just one visit/view stat as you’re describing, as Google takes that visitor directly to the image file, rather than to the gallery post in which it appears.
This won’t show in your referrer stats, as it’s not someone clicking on a link on another website, and because Google encrypts search terms in the majority of cases, the view might also not appear under Search Engine Traffic in stats.
I hope that clarifies things a bit.
It’s certainly unusual to have a 1:1 visitors to view ratio, but it can happen. I don’t see anything in your stats, or in the logs of your site that show anything wrong, though, so you don’t need to be concerned that this is a security issue.
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Thank you, kokkieh. That does make sense, other than the overall 1:1 oddity, which is kind of made odder at this point because visits suddenly dropped. I will mark this as resolved and hope things are less weird moving forward. Thank you both!
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