Weird traffic – probably bots not yet categorized as such?

  • Unknown's avatar
    elkement · Member ·

    Hi Happiness Engineers,

    this is not at all urgent – it is more of an observation I wanted to share as I am not sure if it might be important for the way stats are calculated.

    Summary: Last month (week of April 14) and right now my blog is getting ‘weird traffic’. By weird I mean: Very regular in terms of clicks per time and 24/7, only from the US, and only on Homepage/Archives – distinct from the usual pattern.

    It seems more like a bot than a human being. I am not really ‘worried’ but if this is really automated views rather than genuine clicks it would distort statistics.

    Thanks in advance,
    Elke

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

  • Unknown's avatar
    kardotim · Member ·

    Could you please send me the link of the page where you encounter this?

    Thank you!

  • Unknown's avatar
    elkement · Member ·

    I have concluded this from the statistics of my blog (see link in my first post) and the distinct pattern of the traffic.

    Which link do you need in addition?

    BTW for your info: The weird traffic has now lasted for three days and ended today. I would still be interested if this was a bot that has not yet been recognized.

  • Unknown's avatar
    kardotim · Member ·

    I don’t see any oddities when looking at your blog stats. What exactly looks odd to you? if possible, please describe this in more detail.

  • Unknown's avatar
    elkement · Member ·

    It was the traffic on the days May 30, 31, and June 1.

    As for some days in April (week of 14) the traffic seemed bot-like to me as it was extremely regular, only from the US, and only for home page / archives. It was especially the regular pattern and that it seemed to come from a single user user – the ratio users / views was lower than usual.

    I have also embedded at image from another website of mine in the sidebar. Usually I see log entries in my web server related to clicks on my blog because of that image. But in case of these alleged bot-like traffic I don’t see any. I know it could be a mobile device not displaying the sidebar – but I found it strange that this would be the case every time.

    Thanks for your support – I am not really worried and I don’t want to prevent you from working on more urgent with these questions – I just wanted contribute to the detection of some potentially ‘non-human’ traffic that may distort statistics.

    If I had a chance to investigate the web server’s log I would try to check if the major part of clicks on those days had come from a single IP address or address block coming from a single site and if this site belongs to some automated service.

    Thanks!!

  • Unknown's avatar
    kardotim · Member ·

    It’s hard to determine whether it was human or non-humand traffic. However, GoogleBot and other search engine spiders are not reflected in your stats. We’ll keep an eye on it and feel free to contact us if you notice and other oddities.

    You can also read some more information about stats at http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats

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