First, I apologize if this is in the wrong forum... I noticed an unusual pop in traffic on one of my sites this past March. Below, you'll see "Traffic Origin" numbers for the entire year of 2013 compared to March 2014. You'll notice it all seems to be "Direct address / Bookmarks". That said, how can I start to figure out the who, where and why the unusual pop in traffic? FWIW, I have not done any recent advertising, changes or updates on the site. Thanks! YEAR 2013 Traffic Origin: Direct address / Bookmarks = 3,045 pages or 253 pages/month (76.4 %) Links from a Search Engine = 551 pages (13.8 %) - Google 425 428 - Yahoo! 74 74 - Unknown 49 49 - Dogpile 2 2 - WebCrawler 1 1 Links from an external page = 383 pages (9.6 %) MAR 2014 Traffic Origin: Direct address / Bookmarks = 752,188 pages (99.9 %) Links from a Search Engine = 30 pages (0 %) - Google 19 19 - Unknown 6 6 - Yahoo! 5 5 Links from an external page = 51 pages (0 %)
Hey, To go from using under 4MB of bandwidth to over 7GB in one month is definitely crazy! Do you have any analytical data for the timings of the traffic? For example, was the traffic pretty much all on one day or did it spread out across the month? If your graphs show it to me all on the same day/over 2 days then your site could well have been a target for a distributed denial of service attack. If you haven't already, do a google search of your website address to check if you may have received any heavy advertisement that you were unaware of, although this is unlikely.
The "Days of Month" graph on the bottom of the pic I posted seems to indicate it all started on March 21st, peeked the next day on March 22nd and slowly has been coming back down to normal ever since. I did a search for my site and did not find anything that would suggest it was a target for a distributed denial of service attack.
Ah, of course, I seem to have missed that graphic. I didn't mean to suggest you may find something on Google to indicate you were a DDoS target, I meant more to check that you had not received some type of promotion that you were unaware of (perhaps within an online magazine or popular blog?). Aside from this, I couldn't really give much advice. Can you remember if you inadvertently submitted to any type of traffic exchange or anything similar?
No, I didn't notice anything like a promotion either and I didn't submit to any type of traffic exchange or anything similar. FWIW, I saw a very slight but certainly NOT proportionate increase in clicks to affiliates but with zero signups and/or sales.
Don't you have a control of the SOURCE of the backlinks. If it's Direct traffic, you can't control it, but this looks like a gift from another person if this is the case, lol