For the past 3 days I've been having more traffic than usual. Ca. 150 uniques a day compared to the 90-100 before that. Great! However I'm a little confused because my traffic analyzer doesn't seem to track back this new traffic. I'm using the Cystats Wordpress plugin. For instance, right now it's saying 68 visitors and as referer it only display one url, a google image search. How can this be? Usually I was always able to break it down before, meaning the listed referer urls matched up with the number of visitors. Now I started with digg a couple of days ago (digging stories and leaving comments) and I also believe something on twitter went viral but if they are the cause why doesn't Cystat show me the digg or twitter urls? Interestingly, my bounce rate has pretty much stayed the same - it's just 2% down than usual (40% instead of 38%). Maybe you guys know of a different plugin I could try. After all, if this is genuine traffic I want to keep doing what I'm doing right. Also, I have another question and hope this sub-forum can help. In my hits log I have several 404 errors caused by Mozilla 5.0. Is this a bot? These 404s are really strange because they show long-tail urls that I don't use on my site. E.g.: "http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/frame.php?back=/index.php?Operation=CustomerReviews&ItemId=B000OVLBHG&ReviewPage=6&amazonurl=http%3A%7B%2B%7D%7B%2B%7Dwww.amazon.com%7B%2B%7Dexec%7B%2B%7Dobidos%7B%2B%7Dredirect%3Ftag%3Dusbmemorystic-20%26path%3Dtg%7B%2B%7Dbrowse%7B%2B%7D-%7B%2B%7D468520" "http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/frame.php?back=/index.php?Operation=CustomerReviews&ItemId=B00005U8P3&ReviewPage=181&amazonurl=http%3A%7B%2B%7D%7B%2B%7Dwww.amazon.com%7B%2B%7Dexec%7B%2B%7Dobidos%7B%2B%7Dredirect%3Ftag%3Dusbmemorystic-20%26path%3Dtg%7B%2B%7Dbrowse%7B%2B%7D-%7B%2B%7D4685" These urls look a lot like the structure that was set up by the previous owner of my website but I figured after 4 months this should not be in the cache of the search engines anymore. And like I said only Mozilla 5.0 produces these, not googlebot, yahoo and so on. What also strikes me is that I have many separate visits to my main page ("magic memory") but they come from addresses like this, as a redirect. So not all are giving 404 errors. Does anyone know if I need to worry about this and if so what I can do to fix it? On second thought, I see "amazon" in the above posted urls so I hope it has nothing to do with my amazon affiliate links. Those should actually only link away from my page.... I appreciate any feeback!
Anyone? I actually starting using google analytics this weekend in hope I could get my traffic broken down better. But so far I only see discrepancies between Cystats and GA's reports. Cystats is nowl saying around 190 visitors a day but Google shows only half of that. Cystats tell me 15 people came via search engine and GA says 30. What the heck? Maybe that discrepancy comes from digg traffic which Cystats registers but GA doesnt? Even if Cystats registers digg visits it doesn't seem to be able to list it under referers. Sigh....does anyone maybe know of a really good wordpress plugin that reliably tracks everything, maybe even clickthroughs? (outbound links to ebay) As for the 404 errors, they still show up. I'm still puzzled about this! Well, I hope someone can give me some insight here. Thanks!
I'd go with what Analytics says if you're interested in the volume of "real" visitors instead of simple file requests.
IMO, a lot of people from a single ip may be regarded as one unique! Visitors number will larger than unique!
The search engine may be indexing your site repeatedly OR site scrapers are going through your site with elite proxies trying to increase your traffic while only using up your resources and taking as many resources as they can. Another thing: if it's shared hosting, it may not even be occurring on your primary site, it may be occurring on one of the sites connected to your server