Views without any referrers
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Over the last week I have noticed a sudden increase in visits to my blog from the US without any referrers or search terms. I’ve kept an eye on my stats during the course of each day and these visits to not follow the usual pattern of behaviour, for example, a search for a particular post followed by visits to other posts by one person. The blog has had views from other countries and these have all had referrers and search terms, even if they are not disclosed. Any thoughts on what is happening?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Referrals and searches are only some of the ways that people get to your blog. So not every view has to have a referrer.
Why doesn’t the number of referrers add up to the number of total views?
Not all visitors will land on your blog by clicking a link somewhere else. Visitors may type your URL directly into the web browser, click a link in an email, or click a link in another application which then loads the browser. -
I realise that but it appears to be automated rather than human. Ever visitor direct to a single post. The only way to do that would be to favourite every post of which there are over 300.
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OK, in that case, it could be a bot that WordPress.com just hasn’t filtered out yet.
I am adding the tag modlook to this thread to alert staff. They may be able to give you some insight.
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Thank you. Something similar happened before which turned out to be the Internet Archive. This blog has now been excluded from their site. On another occasion it would happen with a few posts followed by emails from a company offering to use my images as prints on cashmere. They haven’t done that in some time. It occurred to me that it might be someone using a private Pinterest board but that doesn’t explain the pattern of views.
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Hi there,
Of what site are you speaking? I looked at the stats for http://greenford365.wordpress.com/ and I see nothing there that would indicate bot activity. We only count a view if a page fully loads in an active browser window. So unless someone writes a bot that physically opens your site in a browser, waits for the page to finish loading, and then opens the next page in the browser, the view won’t be recorded. Bots don’t work like that.
This looks like one person viewing multiple posts on your site per session. The stats page showing them as multiple visitors is most likely because this person has tracking protection enabled in their browser, or even using a privacy extension in their browser, which prevents us from tracking their activity across your site, so our system sees it as a different visitor each time they open a new page on the site.
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Some privacy extensions can do that, yes, by blocking the referrer headers a site sends us when someone clicks on a link on that site. With Pinterest specifically I’ve also seen that they don’t always send us referrer headers, specifically if the link was clicked on some of their locale (country/language specific) sites.
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@kokkieh This is why I no longer use images on blogs, although I’ve noticed hits without referrers on my other blog which has far fewer posts and (now) no photos. I’ve never worked out how to add that bit of code which stops pinning. I suppose I should be glad I’m getting any views as long as they are genuine. My suspicion is, based on some of the posts that were viewed most often, that the sudden interest in a blog about an obscure west London suburb is down to the US based developer Greystar who are about to change the landscape here. Thanks again for explaining it.
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I’ve never worked out how to add that bit of code which stops pinning.
I don’t know which bit of code you’re referring to, but there’s really no way to prevent people from pinning your photos on Pinterest, or sharing it any other way. If it’s published on a public site it can be shared. On sites where you can install plugins or edit the source code directly you can make it more difficult, but there’s no way to prevent it completely.
I suppose I should be glad I’m getting any views as long as they are genuine.
I’m certain those views are genuine as in a living human being is loading the pages in their browser. Whether they’re looking at or reading the posts is another matter, though :)
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