Strange hits!

rainforest1155 · December 16, 2004

Hi folks,

I just had a look at my statistics and couldn't believe that my traffic is 25MB higher than yesterday when I checked.
Found out that in my august daily photo gallery the last 4 pictures got 92-94 hits on medium size and I'm pretty sure that I didn't linked them external somewhere.

That's very strange, almost the same hitcount for 4 pictures with only 4 or 5 thumbviews per picture in the gallery. Is there a way to trace such anomalies down or could this be an internal problem?
I also checked google for external linking, but I didn't found anything.

Here's the link to the gallery: http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/180783/30/8034193

Did someone experience similar things?

Thanks for your help,
Sebastian

flyingpylon · December 16, 2004

Someone else could have linked to them (this is called hot linking, among other things). You might not see the external links in Google for several weeks, if ever, so that's not a very good way to determine what's going on.

The best way would be to check the web server logs to see where the requests were coming from. But I don't believe we have access to that kind of detail.

Baldy · December 16, 2004

Hi Sebastian,

It's actually quite a common thing.

Once upon a time we'd dig through the logs (not an easy task now that our traffic is really huge) and I remember when a photographer created a gallery of exotic asian fish and suddenly he ws getting 25,000 views per image per day for 5 images, or some number like that.

Turns out Koreans love those fish and were admiring them on a huge Korean message forum.

It was around then that we implemented the no external link option for galleries.

Thanks,
Baldy

Strange hits!

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