Just curious, 5 or 6 days ago, my unique visits jumped from about 166 per day on average to over 1500 per day. Each day it continues to grow gradually more. I haven't made any changes in the past 2 weeks on the site, and I haven't advertised it since the beginning of December, when I submitted it to 130 or so directories. The visits are mostly no referrer links. No referrer links grew from 65% last month to 80% this month. What could cause this to happen?
What stats program do you use? Have you checked the IP addresses and user agents of the visitors. They could be spiders or something.
I'm using Awstats. The IP's are all unique, the user agents vary, typically showing IE on windows systems, sometimes FF on windows systems, and others. I haven't sent and emails out advertising my site, ever. Nor have I advertised in a paper or magazine. But maybe someone did on my behalf, but I couldn't imagine who would do that. The IP's show up from all over the world. I ran some of them through an IP lookup tool, and couldn't find any that have been black listed.
could be someone stealing your bandwidth? i.e. direct link to your image, swf files etc? In fact I have many of such cases... so sad
I thought of that too, but the visitors are all unique, and they are entering into a php file, not an image. In fact, most of them are not creating hits on any of the site images, as only one hit shows up in my logs and that hit is for the php file of the page that they enter on, which means that they either have the site's images in their cache, meaning they are all return visitors, or they are being redirected to my site for some reason and they are all using a text only browser. I don't know, but that is why I'm posting here, I've thought of all of the typical things, but I can't come up with any logical reasons for the traffic jump. There is no hot linking going on, the IP's are all 100% unique, and 80% of my traffic is direct address by either previous visitors or by visitors using text browsers.
I have had this before my self, sorry to say i have no reason to tell you why it has happend I did find that in was my index page that was getting used but never found out what it was and would be intrested as well with what reson it could be.
My index page is the big hitter too, but there is a page that is a very deep page that gets a huge number of hits. It's a 4th level page, index page links to gallery page, which links to another page, which links to this page. I'm wondering if I did someone a favor and they decided to repay it by giving my site to an auto surf network or something. But as I see it, it's no favor, it's a hassle.