A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Monday, September 17, 2018
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Yesterday, a quiet Sunday, hits on this blog went from their usual roughly 1000-1200 a day to 10,280! Does anyone know what happened? Is my secret name Christine Blasey Ford?
My impression is that sometimes a swarm or swarms of bots descend on a site for no discernible reason -- that's happened with my blog which has been inactive (i.e. I haven't posted) for more than a year but is still online. So it could be that. OTOH if it's human visitors, I don't have an explanation. (Early on I installed Google Analytics on my blog, which lets one know e.g. the location of visitors to the site. So if the site gets a large number of hits all from one location, it's probably bots. I'm not suggesting you bother w/ Analytics, though.)
You don't need analytics. If the blogger built in analytics aren't showing a bunch of redirects that makes sense, it's bots and web crawlers. I did assign an article of yours to 20 hs students over the weekend but that's not 10,000 hits.
My impression is that sometimes a swarm or swarms of bots descend on a site for no discernible reason -- that's happened with my blog which has been inactive (i.e. I haven't posted) for more than a year but is still online. So it could be that. OTOH if it's human visitors, I don't have an explanation. (Early on I installed Google Analytics on my blog, which lets one know e.g. the location of visitors to the site. So if the site gets a large number of hits all from one location, it's probably bots. I'm not suggesting you bother w/ Analytics, though.)
ReplyDeleteYou don't need analytics. If the blogger built in analytics aren't showing a bunch of redirects that makes sense, it's bots and web crawlers. I did assign an article of yours to 20 hs students over the weekend but that's not 10,000 hits.
ReplyDelete@Either LFC or David Salmanson,
ReplyDeleteWhat is it in a blog that attracts bots or web crawlers? Is it some keywords, links, what?
@Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether anything specific attracts them or whether it's random -- would just be guessing.