Unsettling spike in blog hits related to Cloudflare?
March 4, 2017 8:32 AM Subscribe
On February 13, my blog traffic, as measured by statcounter.com, increased by more than 10 times over what it had been for a long time previously. This is the second-largest number of hits I've ever gotten.
On February 14, traffic was back to normal again.
On February 15, it was about three times normal. From the 16th onward it's been normal.
I'd like to know what the hell was happening.
Possibly-relevant information:
Google's own stats (the blog is on blogspot.com) are, and have always been, uniformly higher than Statcounter's, and show two peaks, but those peaks are on the 14th and 16th, not 13th/15th, and are much more modest increases, maybe 25% over the normal traffic.
Statcounter either will not or cannot show me the source of the traffic on the days in question; I even briefly upgraded to a paid account with them, in hopes of being able to look at the past hits, but alas. Google's statistics show only the top-level domain associated with incoming traffic, not specific links, and lists only Google sub-sites and Facebook for the relevant time period, with one exception.
Statcounter is one of the sites affected by the Cloudflare bug. Cloudflare has said "The greatest period of impact was from February 13 and February 18 with around 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through Cloudflare potentially resulting in memory leakage (that’s about 0.00003% of requests)."
The only site that Google listed as a source of blog traffic that wasn't Google or Facebook, during the time in question, was somethingawful.com, itself one of the Cloudflare-affected sites.
My questions:
1) Is it plausible that Statcounter could have registered hits to my site that weren't being registered by Google/Blogger? If so, does this mean that my blog was never actually being viewed by anyone?
2) How and why would someone do this? (Please adjust answer vocabulary for low computer/internet literacy level.)
3) Is this something I should be concerned about?
4) If you don't believe that Statcounter is involved, can you propose an alternate explanation that makes sense?
Possibly-relevant information:
Google's own stats (the blog is on blogspot.com) are, and have always been, uniformly higher than Statcounter's, and show two peaks, but those peaks are on the 14th and 16th, not 13th/15th, and are much more modest increases, maybe 25% over the normal traffic.
Statcounter either will not or cannot show me the source of the traffic on the days in question; I even briefly upgraded to a paid account with them, in hopes of being able to look at the past hits, but alas. Google's statistics show only the top-level domain associated with incoming traffic, not specific links, and lists only Google sub-sites and Facebook for the relevant time period, with one exception.
Statcounter is one of the sites affected by the Cloudflare bug. Cloudflare has said "The greatest period of impact was from February 13 and February 18 with around 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through Cloudflare potentially resulting in memory leakage (that’s about 0.00003% of requests)."
The only site that Google listed as a source of blog traffic that wasn't Google or Facebook, during the time in question, was somethingawful.com, itself one of the Cloudflare-affected sites.
My questions:
1) Is it plausible that Statcounter could have registered hits to my site that weren't being registered by Google/Blogger? If so, does this mean that my blog was never actually being viewed by anyone?
2) How and why would someone do this? (Please adjust answer vocabulary for low computer/internet literacy level.)
3) Is this something I should be concerned about?
4) If you don't believe that Statcounter is involved, can you propose an alternate explanation that makes sense?
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This thread is closed to new comments.
And yes, it's possible hits are recorded that didn't actually happen - in both GA an any other tracker that "calls home" via javascript. One situation where this happens is called referrer spam. If you don't recognize the domains that are supposedly sending traffic to your site, this may be whats happening here. These sites advertise their domain by hoping you see them in your GA logs and then visit the site to see why they're sending "traffic" (actually fake traffic) to your site.
posted by cgg at 8:54 AM on March 4, 2017