Weird visitor stats
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Hi,
Since February 6, my site has been getting weird surges in traffic. Normally, I’d get about 200 visitors a day, but on Feb 6 I got 2000+, then it went back to normal for a few days and then Feb 13, 6000+, then 13,000+, today it went up to 22,000. This may seem an odd thing to complain about, but the figures are clearly not genuine. Referrals from other sites aren’t higher than normal, there’s no increase in comments, and there’s no indication of a particularly viral post.
The visits appear to be all coming from the US and are scattered across multiple pages on the blog. I suspect it’s all a phantom in the data i.e. there are no additional visits but US traffic is being recorded incorrectly?
My main problem with it is that, assuming its not genuine traffic, I don’t know what the actual traffic on the site is.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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My guess is you’re seeing bot traffic. This just happened to me and completely messed up my visitor and views stats. If you use Google Analytics 4, you can see where this increased traffic is actually originating from. I found the spurious traffic on my site was coming from China. WordPress can’t seem to go this far and only shows this extra traffic coming from data centers in the US – Ashburn and North Bergen. There are plugins that might help keep the bots away but they cost extra. These bots don’t seem to do an actual damage (other than ruin your stats) and move on after they scraped your site’s contents.
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Bots seem most likely but if they are web scraping, it is odd that they are visiting the same pages over and over.
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