hundreds of extra hits

i usually average 50 - 60 hits a day. i have my faithful researchers who make ten or so hits a day, and some days if they all come and i get some new constantly refreshing person i go over a hundred. but this is very rare.

these are my stats for the last three days.

Wednesday 6th October 2004 252 7 4 3
Tuesday 5th October 2004 148 22 19 3
Monday 4th October 2004 54 13 11 2

i would expect 48 hits on tuesday and 52 maybe total on wednesday, but at this time on any day i usually have oh maybe 20.

my website is on the genealogy of the greek gods. including Cheiron, that most rightous of centaurs.

at first i thought i was getting lots of hits for the virus manufacturer Chiron but none of the remaining stats show this. i went to google and entered "chiron" and did not come up on the first couple of pages.

i spell it the greek way rather than the roman way but have the roman spelling as an alternate in his notes, so chiron would come up in google.

"chiron genealogy" does not put me in the first five pages of hits but "cheiron genealogy" puts me on the top of the second page.

so i am probably not getting all these extra hits from the chiron flu shot problem.

but 148 hits one day and then 252 hits the next? instead of my normal 48 or 52? looks like a hundred extra hits are being added every day.

we will see if i have more than 300 tomorrow.

Consider looking at the "Visitor Paths" stats for your site.

It shows you the URL that someone used to find your site, which would be useful to show phrases typed into a search engine.

It also tracks where people went within your site. If there are lots of instances of just one or two hits, it's likely that people found your site by mistake and left without sticking around.

If the majority show a path of several pages, and a visit length of a few minutes, you might be able to assume that they are "real" users of your site.

Maybe someone else's web page is now featuring a link to your site, and is driving traffic there. The "Came From" statistics page is a good place to look for clues.

now i seem to have done something strange using the reply-with-quote, sorry, just read my mind which are the quotes.

Originally Posted by mhamel

Consider looking at the "Visitor Paths" stats for your site.

yes, this is one of my favorite parts of statcounter. not as favorite as the country/ISP, nothing will replace my affection for the ISP stats.

[quote="mhamel"]

It shows you the URL that someone used to find your site, which would be useful to show phrases typed into a search engine.[quote]

"came from" is much more useful for me because many of my visitors come thru the Ancient World Web, which is not a search engine. people know that they can find me there, so i get many repeat visitors thru that site. i also have a family genealogy page with a link to my greek gods genealogy site, and get hits thru that site also, including many who are repeat visitors.

Originally Posted by mhamel

It also tracks where people went within your site. If there are lots of instances of just one or two hits, it's likely that people found your site by mistake and left without sticking around.

yes, most of my hits go to my main page, which is designed to get rid of less serious students.

also, for example, i get a great many hits for "dystonia" which is not only a greek mythological character but also a neurological condition. the neurological condition people are not interested in the genealogy of dystonia. it is also a butterfly (just about all greek mythological characters are butterflys) and those people don't stick around much either.

Originally Posted by mhamel

If the majority show a path of several pages, and a visit length of a few minutes, you might be able to assume that they are "real" users of your site.

actually not. because my site has more than six thousand (6,000) pages and i am using the free statcounter, i only have the counter on my first and second level pages. each letter of the alphabet has a page of listing-of-names of the characters of greek mythology (second level). each character has a genealogy page (third level) and a citations page linked from the genealogy page (fourth level),

google and yahoo generally only index my first and second level pages, tho some of my third level pages have been showing up in searches lately at google.

new users tend to use my on-site search page (FreeFind) but experienced users have figured out that the letter pages are easier. transliteration of greek to english is tricky.

i tend to have visitors who look at my main index page for four seconds and go away and then my faithful guys who are around for an hour or more. the visitor length does not show this well because several of my faithfuls are on isps that don't show repeat visits. but i know my faithful visitors.

my site is a resource for researchers, and i have several who come in, check something, go away, come back in 15 minutes or a couple of hours, come back again. the visitor path stats do show this.

but since i don't have code on the individual's pages, the only way i know where someone has been is when they go back to a letter page and the path shows where they came from to go to that letter page.

Originally Posted by mhamel

Maybe someone else's web page is now featuring a link to your site, and is driving traffic there. The "Came From" statistics page is a good place to look for clues.

yes, three sites are sending me visitors. the Ancient World Web, my own Bouvier Family Genealogy site, and the mother of all genealogy link sites, Cyndi's List. but these are going to be people who know what my site is about before they get here.

i had analyzed all those ideas before i posted.

i think that the cause for these inflated statistics has three possiblities, or a combination of three.
1) i have a frequent visitor from france who is a refresher.
2) one of the main characters in greek mythology is Cheiron or Chiron, that most rightous of Centaurs, and the current problem with the flu virus is caused by a problem the company named Chiron is having. i have not had any such searches and a search for Chiron/Cheiron on google puts me out of the first five pages.
3) the statcounter counter did not reset its number for two days.

since this is the first time that i have had these unexplained numbers and the problem has gone away today, i truly do suspect that the counter got stuck.

[graham35]

since this is the first time that i have had these unexplained numbers and the problem has gone away today, i truly do suspect that the counter got stuck.

I told all my friends - not to visit your site today, that fixed for you

glad you are looking out for me.

don't get too many visitors from spain tho i do have one who comes in about once a month and stays an hour or so.

if that is a friend of yours, tell him to hold off until the chiron problem calms down.

still averaging 60 to 70 page loads a day. bunch of new visitors who don't stay a minute and my faithful visitors who stay an hour or two. i do not have one picture.

this morning when i checked about ten am my time (los angeles time, it is right now twelve midnight) i had 145 page loads in the summary.

i did have a refresher and a hundred of those showed in the path and in the page load, just like they ought to do.

tonight when i checked i had 236 page loads today. but there are only about 30 new page loads in the page load section.

so i really do think my counter gets stuck and keeps registering hits that are not happening.

i copy off the page load data. i am absolutely sure that there were not a hundred page loads between the time i copied them this morning and the ones i copied off right now.

today i had 400 pageloads. 400. four hundred.

this is a poky little academic page. i have some faithful visitors who stick around for long periods of time (hours) but most come, see there are no pictures, and leave within five seconds. i only have counters on about 30 of 3,000 pages.

the last hundred pageloads came in 42 seconds. 42 seconds.

this guy is making a mockery of statcounter. i am getting mad.

this is the drill down for this visitor


VISITOR ANALYSIS Referring Link ~http://www.csulb.edu/~dbouvier/Entities/indexS.html <http://www.csulb.edu/dbouvier/Entities/indexS.html>
Host Name mail.windjammer.com
IP Address 208.255.212.6
Country United States Region -
City -
ISP Uunet Technologies Inc
Returning Visits 0
Visit Length 42 seconds

VISITOR SYSTEM SPECS
Browser MSIE 6.0
Operating System Windows jammer
Resolution 1024x768
Javascript Enabled

Originally Posted by exoticars

If you are getting hundreds of unexpected page loads, couldn't it be that some search engine or marketing program is spidering through all your pages and somehow looping? I don't know the technical solution, but 'robots=no' or some such html meta tag (I'm really just guessing) to keep programs from searching your site and skewing your counts? If there is a common use of one of your God's names that could be attracting casual surfers, it could be attracting a spidering program too.

Sandy
http://www.exoticars-usa.com[/url]

now that is an interesting idea. i do get a lot of hits from people searching for dynomia (lawlessness) son of eris (strife), which is apparently a medical condition and a butterfly also. tho most of my gods are also butterflys.

but i thought that spidering programs didn't show up. i am on the first page for most searches in both google and yahoo, so they must be spidering me. also dogpile, msn, several other search engines. also i use an onsite search from FreeFind which spiders me every week, down three or four levels, and they have never shown up.

off topic, sorry, putting my genealogy hat on. do you do antique cars? i am looking for information on the lozier produced in plattsburg new york in 1910.

whatever it is it seems to have gone away. yesterday i had 12 hits and today about noon i have 20, just about normal for a sunday. for some reason i get very few page views on the weekends.

this seems to be the counter equivalent to spam. i mean why would anyone pay for a counter if all it showed was a thousand of these things?

i do get a lot of hits that look like echos, where the exact page is reloaded from the same previous page five or six times. someone said that that is refresing but i wonder.

about the lozier, my grandfather was the bandmaster for the company band around 1910. i have a photograph. also several family members worked for them. they moved from plattsburgh to detroit after 1910 and my uncle went with them. then they stopped making cars completely. i asked at the peterson auto museum in los angeles and their expert on antique cars had never heard of it, so give your hubby high marks.

will look for the book and get back to you. thanks very much.

PS the los angeles public library has three copies, just put it on hold. have been working on this problem for three years! thanks again.

[webado]

Diane, spiders and bots are visitors and are logged. Usually they don't have javascript enabled. Some hybrid creatures may have it too, despite what Marjolein says, since I've seen "infestations" at times of comprehensive rapid sequential hits with javascript enabled.

Bots and spiders have schedules by which they return to re-spider web sites. I have seen one coming daily at 10pm and 4am, give or take a few minutes. If it makes it happy to re-spider something that hasn't changed in a long time, oh, well.

You can control to some extent bots by placing a robots.txt in the root of the web site with instructions of which bots are allowed and which aren't Many do not bother to read this, only the big ones like Googlebot do.

You can re-invite bots to visit daily or weekly or monthly or whatever, by using a meta tag in the head section of your web pages.