wordpress.com as referrer
-
If it is any consolation to anyone and it probably isn’t, apart from the one hour time zone difference, my WP stats are sort of in synch with Sitemeter stats.
I got a few of the WordPress.com referrer hits, but nothing like the huge numbers some are reporting. Overall my stats will still be about 4,000 for the month, which has been “normal” since around June.
I do find the statement from Matt rather interesting, given there has been nothing since and things have “calmed down” on the spikes thing for other people.
I had spikes from a completely different source at the same time, being crawled by a site and that registered as stats – let’s face it, crawling a site is not real stats!
-
@teamoyeniyi – Now the external tracker that I use to test wordpress.com stats, flag counter lines up as well… as long as I remove the wordpress.com referrers. Which is to say, it seems to think that the posts and pages count is correct.
Anyway, perhaps we’ll hear something about it some day.
-
teamoyeniyi, what exactly is ‘crawling’ or being crawled by a site? And how does one recognize it? (sorry to be so ignorant!). My monthly stats are only just beginning to get close to yours, and I definitely had a spike during that “wordpress.com referrer” period…low numbers but high percentage-wise for my daily stats. I had 92 wordpress.com referrer visits spread over 4 days, from the 20th to the 24th. None before and none since. (this is the 10th month of my blog)
The stats page can show us our total suspect views all added up–click on “this week” in the upper right of the referrer box on the stats page. Then click on “last 30 days” or “quarter” to see all the suspect wordpress.com stats added up into one total. WordPress.com is not listed in all my previous year’s stats as a referrer until that one 4-day period.
-
Ingidcc, I think being crawled is definitely different to the WP as referrer type spikes people had. It is a bot, like the searche ngine bots, crawling through your site. In the case of the search engines like Google, Bing etc, it is to index your content, one hopes! In the case of the crawler I had, they didn’t say what the purpose of their crawling was.
-
-
-
-
Matt, do we have any update on this?
1. If we are being undercounted, as you mentioned above, what actions are being taken to rectify the situation?
2. What happens to the historical/past stats data?
3. How would the future stats going to be counted?
4. What do we do with the 7 days bump we received in the stats?
5. Why is this not a uniform issue across the board at WP.com, as some bloggers seems to suggest that they were not impacted?These are some of the questions which I am sure many others are also contemplating. Hopefully, you will provide a summary explanation. Thanks.
-
Since yesterday my stats have jumped dramatically, but NOT my referrers of search terms. SiteMeter seems to agree with the increase, so I’m not sure it is anythign WP have done, but is anyone else experiencing this?
To mornings in a row I’ve had almost a day’s worth of hits in the hours from midnight to 7am.
I’m not complaining, as they seem legit – that is spaced out over time and from different IPs etc.
Maybe it is coming from somewhere I’ve commented or something, but I really have no idea.
-
@teamoyeniyi
This may on may not be a factor. You have posts on you blog that have been submitted to StumbleUpon and what you are seeing in your stats depicts visits that result from one or more posts being stumbled like “She’s a Star”. StumbleUpon drives more traffic referrals than any other social media site does. See here > The Lifecycle of a Web Page on StumbleUpon and note what the half-life life cycle looks like on the infographic. -
@Timethief – I think the mystery may be partially solved – seems someone else StumbleUpon-ed a post…. WOW
-
-
My stats were fine and just now they’ve randomly changed with my best days total going down – not happy, can’t you just leave it :(
-
@TT my sharing stats have never been remotely accurate – EVER.
Since yesterday I can now see that there is still something strange, if I exclude the StumbleUpon hits. This morning I have only 4 hits from Referrers and 4 search Engine Term hits, yet I have 164 page views for the day alreay according to WordPress. SiteMeter tells me I have 73. Even if I add on 20 for the hour time zone difference, that is only 93. So the the WP stats are almost (not quite) double. There are no StumbleUpon referrals today. It is 6:34am my time.
SiteMeter and WP always used to be pretty close. If I go back to yesterday and exclude the StumbleUpon hits, there is still a vast difference and all those hits to the home page that I mentioned yesterday BEFORE the StumbledUpon – most of which hit essentially the shared post only, I think.
It is just strange. No increase in spam comments, so that isn’t it. Not all from one domain, so I can exclude a crawler as the culprit this time. No WordPress.com as a referrer either, so it isn’t that issue, which means I probably shouldn’t be on this thread, but then maybe it is another change WP made that we don’t know about. When I did see WP as a referrer, SiteMeter also had those included as far as I could tell.
-
Actually, SiteMeter tells me that hour difference had 9. 73 + 9 = 82 which IS exactly half 164. So that IS strange.
Right now, of 169 page views on WP, 122 are registered as the home page.
-
-
I am still in a total free fall. My numbers are abnormally low. :-( My blog is by no means as popular as some, but I usually don’t have to fight just to make it to 50 each day.
-
My totals so far to-day.
Total views of posts on your blog 491
These include
Home page 430
Total views referred by links to your blog 48
-
I’d like to bring this back to the front page so it does not get overlooked. Certainly there was a problem that no one has explained which, for a week at least, produced some strange statistics — and comments from WordPress people on this thread acknowledged the issue. A number of us have asked for an explanation so that we could look at our statistics with confidence. This is not a fault-finding mission — rather I think we deserve some explanation of what happened and what the current state of play is. Thanks in advance.
-
- The topic ‘wordpress.com as referrer’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 