Sudden Traffic Spike - The Good, The Bad, And The Mysterious

byja114

231 followers

5 years ago

Yesterday morning, I looked in Google Analytics and saw that visitors to my site had spiked on Thursday by more than 10x what my daily average had been over the previous month.

At first, I was excited. But then I looked at the stats, and realized that the surge in traffic probably was coming from some kind of automated crawler or bot. Here are some things that made me think so:

1. Of Thursday's visitors, 90% were from the same city;

2. Among that 90%, all were new visitors, and the bounce rate was 100%;

3. The visits were not concentrated on one or two posts, there was at least one visit to every post or page on my site.

So, that was a bummer. I assumed that the visits were all from a search engine, or Alexa, but I wasn't sure what to make of it. Is there anything that would cause that? And maybe more importantly, was there anything, good or bad - e.g., a change in search rankings - that might result?

But here's where it gets more interesting. After going back and looking at my stats more closely, I found that I had a similar one-day jump back in June. The only difference in that case was that while all of the visitors were from the same country (US), I wasn't able to drill down to the state or city level, as it was listed as "not set."

Sometime soon after the spike in June, my site's Alexa ranking started to climb steadily in July and August. Since it's based on a trailing 90-day measurement and I started my site in late April, I assumed at the time that the climb in ranking was a result of the site being older and having more of those trailing 90 days where it even existed and could have traffic, along with very slight growth over the weeks and months that the site had been live.

But then sometime in late August or September, my Alexa ranking disappeared. From my understanding, this means that there has been so little traffic that it doesn't even appear on Alexa's "radar" for consideration. Note: I was using the free version that provides estimated rankings, not the paid version that measures exact traffic numbers.

It was pretty deflating to suddenly not even have an estimated Alexa ranking, especially after it had climbed by about 1.8 million spots over roughly two months. And it was a little confusing too, because I could see that my overall traffic was continuing to increase, even if slowly.

I decided not to fixate on it, and thought maybe Alexa changed how the free ranking tool works - reducing the number of sites that it includes in the estimated rankings, meaning my site now was outside that threshold.

This morning, I remembered that on Thursday, I went into Site Manager/SitePlus/Website Details and under Page Speed Insights, I refreshed the scan for all of my posts/pages. This was on Thursday morning; the spike in traffic happened on Thursday afternoon.

I figure there must be a connection, right? I didn't make a note of when the last previous scan date was for any of the posts/pages, but I hadn't done it manually in a while. It wouldn't surprise me if it was right before the previous spike in traffic back in June.

Questions Remain...

In the end, even though I'm fairly certain that refreshing the scans triggered a search engine (presumably Google) to do an automated visit to each post/page on the site, I still have questions.

• Will refreshing the scans always trigger a flurry of automated search engine traffic?
• Will refreshing the scans hurt (or help) my search rankings, and how often should I refresh them?
• How many sites are given an estimated ranking in the free version of the Alexa rank tool?
• Is there a way to see the estimated traffic numbers for sites at a given Alexa ranking? Meaning, if I wanted to see traffic volumes of sites with rankings of 1 million, 3 million, 5 million, etc., is that available?

I would love to hear others' views on this, regardless of whether you have seen something like this happen on your site. How you would proceed, what it means, etc. And if this has happened on your site, I'm curious what you learned from it. Have you seen any changes in traffic patterns, search rankings, Alexa rankings, or anything else?

Hope everyone enjoys the rest of the weekend!