The past few days, I'm seeing nearly 200% increase in page views. I added a lot of new content, but my webstats page has me thinking it should be at most a 50% legitimate increase. I'm used to seeing people hit the same page in succession a couple of times, of few times, like a couple of times per day. But this is happening throughout the day, and like 10 times plus. And the "host" column of my stats is giving various ones, not just the same identical characters.
One more attachement. Now, there's stretches of an half hour or so, where every one showing up is different. But then these repeats will surge through. As I wrote, I'm not unfamiliar with these, but am unfamiliar with so many, this often per day.
I'd suggest its an experimental bot/spider that should be giving its name in the user agent field but is spoofing a legit browser. Its not likely to be reading the robots.txt file so you have few choices * ignore it * contact the ISP & complain * block it via .htaccess * redirect it via .htaccess to a page that asks them to email you with an explanation of what they are up to
Thank you for the feedback. With that suggestion in mind, I'm beginning to see why a few of those pages might be getting visited by some form of bot / spider.