My Wordpress traffic has gone through the roof, huge referrals from wordpress.com - why?
-
My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined.
This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this.
The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article.
Can anyone offer any insight into this situation?
Thanks
-
Thanks Keri.
I did think perhaps it was something to do with that because the views starting coming in immediately after the exclusive content went up. I checked the homepage and couldn't see my blog there anywhere though, even when logged out of wordpress.
The strange thing is that while it shows my total views have had a massive increase, individual views have not gone up, so it's as if the extra views have not actually come to the blog, not even the homepage. If my blog was featured on the wordpress homepage, do you think each impression could be counted as a view? Perhaps that would explain all the extra views without extra traffic.
The influx of views has dropped off again now, the wordpress.com referrals ran for 7 days in total, peaking on the 3rd day and then gradually declining. All in all a nice problem to have provided that it's not a malicious attack!
-
Actually, you may be featured on the home page as the fastest growing blog that day or something. I had that once a few years back when Matt Cutts linked to one of my posts on my wordpress.com blog in the comments of his post. Because of the traffic from that post, it hit an algorithm in wordpress.com and the post/domain was linked to from wordpress.com itself.
-
Yes that's correct, on wordpress.com rather than wordpress.org and on the wordpress servers.
I'm glad at this stage that it is on wordpress.com instead of self-hosted as the traffic levels probably would have taken it down by now otherwise.
Just seems strange that the referrals are being shown to come from wordpress.com itself.
-
Ahh I see, so you're using Wordpress.com not Wordpress.org? I am not familiar with the analytics for wordpress.com - so not entirely sure.
So its on wordpress servers though, like mysite.wordpress.com?
-
It's the wordpress analytics I'm using so I can't drill down into anything more specific unfortunately.
I can't filter out my own location but traffic has jumped from 3-4k views per day to 18k views, then 72k view and looks like today's views will even eclipse the 72k from yesterday.
-
Also, are you filtering out your own traffic from your location?
-
Can you drill down into something else? Visitor location perhaps or service provider, to look for any commonality in the spike in traffic?
There is an interesting post here on the SEER blog here about misleading traffic reports.
-
No the site isn't monetized so no increase in ad revenue - it's a wordpress.com install.
The referring link just shows up as wordpress.com, but when I click through I can't see a link to my blog on the wordpress homepage.
Do you think it could be bots or a malicious attack? Surely if it was bots it would at least show up as views of the homepage?
-
Is the site monetized? are you seeing any increase in ad revenue or is it just hit and run bot traffic?
Have you checked your back links in WMT to see where the wordpress link is located?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Wordpress Old Articles date - Update or Not
Hey there! Been reading around and I believe that there isn't a perfect answer to this question, but I surely want to know your opinion. It's a fact that google likes new content but also updated content, so whats your position concerning the wordpress articles. Meaning, when I decide to update articles from 2011 on its content, should I also update the date? If I make a search and an article from 2011 will be shown, its unlikely that I will click on it... So that you can understand my point.
Content Development | | prozis0 -
Embedded Traffic Stats?
Hi all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer here please..... my client is an information resource on internet safety, it is a non profit website just blogging about internet safety and threats. To cut a long story short, the client has relationships with all the police forces and universities in the UK, they regularly republish content on their sites - with approval (and doesn't have relations with many dozens of sites which do not have approval to republish...) Although the goal of the website is information distribution and not to raise money, the site does have a number of KPIs which it needs to meet to justify its sponsorship by the likes of facebook, google, microsoft etc. We are looking to make the content the site publishes embeddable so rather than just republishing 'our' content and it looking like the third party sites' own work, we at least get the credit. The issue we are trying to work out is down to stats. If site B embeds our article and it gets 1,000 views on their site, do these 1,000 people appear in our stats too? I would guess that it does as the content is being loaded from our site each time the 1,000 people visits. In which case, would these 1,000 hits appear as direct traffic or referral traffic in the stats when they read the content on site B? We have run some tests and not seeing the test site appearing as a referrer in the stats so a little puzzled. Many thanks for any advice
Content Development | | daedriccarl0 -
Wordpress Overly Dynamic URLs
Moz is giving me an overly dynamic URL warning for around 30 or so of these on our blog. http://blog.domain.com/?page=products&do=domain-com-looks-like-a-blog-title I have no idea what's causing this, we have the permalinks set up for category/post and are running yoast. Anyone have any idea what it is? And how can I stop them being crawled. They link to the blog homepage when clicked, which is set to canonical in the head so it shouldn't do any harm - but i'd like to remove them all the same. Will /Disallow /?=page work in robots.txt?
Content Development | | SolopressPrint0 -
How do I properly sitemap a site with static pages + Wordpress in it's own directory?
I apologize for the awkward wording in the headline. No to the issue, I have a site with static pages that are created as follows: url.com, url.com/page1, url.com/page2, etc. I then have WordPress install at url.com/blog. What is the proper method for creating a comprehensive sitemap for my entire domain. I like the sitemap feature provided by Yoast SEO plugin but I assume it will only index the wordpress directory (url.com/blog). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Content Development | | Qcmny0 -
Blogger to Wordpress guide on moving
Hi does anyone know a good guide for moving from blogger to wp, without losing rankings and moving over content and comments? I also want to change from a .blogspot addres to my own .com any help?
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
Same SEO Impact for: ''blog.domaine.com/'' and ''domaine.com/blog/
I would like to add a WordPress blog to my online store. My shopping cart is BigCommerce. My store URL is: http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com I know the ''BEST'' option will be to have a blog like this: http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/blog/ But I don't thing it is possible on BigCommerce platforme. If I can have a blog with this sub-domaine: http://www.blog.furnacefilterscanada.com will it be a efficient for SEO? Thank you, BigBlaze
Content Development | | BigBlaze2050 -
Are there any tools available for wordpress that can help with SEO?
I'm looking for a wordpress plugin that that keeps current/updates with all the changes that constantly take place on various search engines. Is there such an addon that meets this criteria?
Content Development | | uofmiamiguy0 -
Images for WordPress
I'd be grateful for any advice regarding sourcing, adding & attributing images/photos for my WordPress blog. Budget is tight so have to rule out paid stock libraries, but I heard that Flickr images can be used under Creative Commons providing they are correctly attributed. eg. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of-it/2011/04/07/mps-criticise-bbc-siemens-38m-contract-failure-40092428/ eg 2. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2011/10/05/bt-lines-up-300mbps-broadband-launch-40094109/ Example 1 does not seem to link back but example 2 does. Are there any rules on this? I have looked at some plugins: Insights, iFlickr, WP Flickr Manager, Photo Dropper. Looking to save time by streamlining the process of adding images, resizing and attributing. Many thanks.
Content Development | | martyc0