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Why are there artificially high levels of traffic to my blog today?

  1. geoffsteen
    Member

    Hi, over the last week or so my blog has received a higher-than-expected number of visits for an old post (dated 2010) on Christmas decorations in our local shopping centre. Today, the numbers visiting this post are increasing by the minute, giving the blog its best ever day and it's only 8.30am. All the visits are from Hong Kong and all are going straight to this old post, all using the search term 'centre Christmas decorations'.

    The blog is not remotely optimised for anything to do with Christmas, and it doesn't appear in Google SERPS for any Christmas keywords, including this one. Does anyone know what's going on? And how can I remove these visits from my stats?

    Many thanks, Geoff
    Blog url: http://llandudnopictures.wordpress.com/

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Have you tried using an Image search for "centre Christmas decorations?" WP.com blogs do really well on image searches. You may also have hit the radar on Chinese search engines.

  3. geoffsteen
    Member

    Hi Raincoaster, many thanks for the response. The blog doesn't appear high in SERPS in Google or Yahoo Hong Kong, it's very odd. We've changed the URL of the post and removed any Christmas keywords, and all seems to be back to normal today (fingers crossed).

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    Personally, I never complain about excess hits. That's not what I consider a problem. There are lots of legit reasons for a sudden surge in traffic. It doesn't make sense to annoy regular readers of your blog just to forestall such spikes.

  5. auxclass
    Member

    Why worry about extra traffic? makes no sense to me - maybe some of them will look around and subscribe - why take away their enjoyment of your site? Once in a while I get a spike on a two year old Post - people pass a Post around and share it with friends or sometimes Post links on a forum - don't upset search engines by changing URL's of Posts etc -

  6. raincoaster
    Member

    It makes sense if your host is iffy. DDoS attacks can take you offline, but I have never known one to succeed at WordPress.com.

  7. geoffsteen
    Member

    @Auxclass Normally I'm not concerned about extra traffic, I'd be delighted. But this Hong Kong thing is really weird. To get 100s of hits in one hour, on an 2-year-old post, from a territory which normally provides negligible visitors, using the exact same keyword, for which we're not optimised AT ALL and for which we appear nowhere in SERPS... It's patently not real people visiting.

    I just wondered if there was an explanation.

  8. auxclass
    Member

    I gave up some time ago trying to figure out how people got to my site based on the keywords I see - search engines work in strange ways - I don't think they want us to understand fully how they work - it is like an arms race - -

    what might have happened is a search engine might have tweaked their search algorithms and you benefited from the changes - I think that is what happened with some of my Posts - one of my two year old Posts went from 8 views a day to 40 to 50 views a day for the summer this year but a year ago the same Post stayed at 8 a day for the whole summer - another Post went from 4 a day to 20 a day for the same summer period - again a 2 year old Post that was blah the first summer -

    My site is about boating safety so I get wide seasonal swings but this year the swing was higher than in the past

    Again - don't worry about it much or you will go crazy

  9. geoffsteen
    Member

    Very true! Thank you for all your help.

  10. auxclass
    Member

    You be welcome & good luck

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