Unlikely Visitors

[therrick]

I have a personal Web site I'm using to market my house for sale by owner. So far, there has been no advertising other than the sign in my front yard with the URL on it. In the last two days I've gotten 35 hits from Kentucky (where the house is), 19 from Pennsylvania, 15 from Maryland, 14 from Massachusetts, 3 from New York and one from Florida. Perhaps someone who lives here in Kentucky mentioned to a friend or family member living out of state that my house is for sale and suggested they visit the Web site. But the number of out-of-state hits don't make sense to me; particularly when the only way to know about the site is by seeing my yard sign or by word of mouth. The majority of out-of-state hits (MD, PA, MA) were through Adelphia.

Got any idea why I would get 35 hits from the state where my house is and 52 from other states? I could understand getting a few hits from out of the region, but more? Doesn't make sense to me. Please advise and educate...

Thanks

therrick

[therrick]

Looked like somebody was padding the results.

[Petula Darling]

I think Adelphia does some sort of routing thing that makes the stats come out strange.
I live in the middle of the coast of Maine, and someone I know who is just a few miles away visited my website one day - it showed up on my statcounter as being an Adelphia user from New Hampshire.

[VideoChat]

That isn't surprising..........
I am temporarily on Netzero dial up and it sometimes shows my IP to
be in New York even though I am really in CA

[webado]

Well run the ip address through www.whois.sc/ipaddress and you'll see what it resolves to in terms of geo location. The geo-location of an Ip address is really determined by the ISP datacenter location, not by the physical location of the user. usually you get assigned an Ip address from the nearest datacenter but sometimes it may be from further away, maybe even a different state. Some ISP's don't' even bother to provide distinct geo- location information for whole blocks of IP's that may cover an entire country or continent.

Don't even try to figure out AOL user locations - they are all out of one of maybe 6 datacenters. Virginia - Reston is the one for the entire Eastern USA.

[RizThon]

"Some ISP's don't' even bother to provide distinct geo- location information for whole blocks of IP's that may cover an entire country or continent."

Is there a way to update the IP / location database ?
A lot of my visitors are shown as coming from Paris but looking at the hostname it's easy to guess where they're really from.
For example there's the ISP called Free with which you got addresses like "xxxNN-1-198-168-0-1.fbx.proxad.net" with xxx being the 1st 3 letters of the town, and NN the 1st two digits of the zip number. Using the 2 digits zip number could allow to be more precise than just "it's from Paris !".
With Wanadoo it's even better as the hostname is "XTown-192-168-0-1.some-things.wanadoo.fr" where X is a letter and Town the name of the town...
A simple parsing of the hostnames could do the trick.

So again is there somewhere to write about this ? If there's nothing yet it could be a good idea to let the users add their knowledge !

[webado]

No, sorry, geo databases are not under Statcounter's control. ISPs update the information they want to update, the way they want to update it, if they want to update it. This is the generally accepted way. In fact they don't even have to provide any such information.

Now if you see "prox" anything - that's a proxy - meaning the user may well be half way around the world in fact, and going through a proxy service for whatever reason. The proxy server is where it is reported to be (or its datacenter is), not the user, about whom you cannot know anyhting at this point.

FYI there are hundreds of millions of ip addresses resolving to hundreds of thousands of different isp's with as many methods of representing or not their whereabouts. Not any sort of parsing you can just program.

[RizThon]

Here proxad doesn't mean there's a proxy, it's just the name of the ISP...
Indeed there's a lot of ISPs...but still in the database you know which ISP correspond to which IPs, so knowing the IP, you could know what regex to use to get a better location (if needed).
It was just some thoughts...if you have no access to the database...
Thanks for the replay anyway ! :-D

[webado]

First off the ISP (datacenter) is obtained from a a php server function: gethostbyip. Very simple really.

Other geo details are from an ip lookup in a database.

[temptess_tammy]

I know this post might be a little old
but for future reference dont dissmiss the idea that the hits you recieved may have been from peole searching for other things that might be found in your key words..
or
some of your visitors may also be looking for a home in a town with the same name as your town but a different state.. lol, I have even looked up a suburb in australia on the net to find this same toen name in another country