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
-
Best practice for Wordpress /page/2/
I realize that it might be a minor point but it still bugs me. We have a blog with a number of posts. Content of the posts does not expire or age (in the rare case something changes, we do update the information in the posts). The wordpress blog is setup to display our latest posts and displays 15 posts at once. Since we have a lot of content, the older posts get pushed off the front page which is understandable and desirable behavior. However the pages that have older posts have names like "/page/2/", /page/3/, /page/4/ and so on. This does not look very SEO or user friendly to me. What do you think? Did you come up with something better then /page/ and then a number?
Content Development | | SirMax0 -
Wordpress Blog Pages, Duplicate Title Tag
Anyone have any experience in fixing the duplicate Title tag on a Wordpress blog multiple pages Basically the title tag remains the same on the pages /Blog/ /Blog/Page/2/ /Blog/Page/3/ My good friend Yoast Plugin doesn't seem to of resolved this (Unless i have missed something?) I don't really see this to be effecting anything and wouldn't of through it would either, but it would be nice to not see the notification within Moz site crawls and campaigns etc, its more of a cosmetic problem Any solutions ? Thanks James
Content Development | | Antony_Towle0 -
Ecommerce Traffic increase - moving from 500 to 1000 words/category
Hello, We have found traffic to increase upon adding content to category descriptions. Our category pages are stronger than our product pages. Our main categories (the fourty that are in the navigation) have 500 words on them, carefully written helpful content. We are trying to decide whether to increase (for these 40 categories) to 1000 words per category. Do you think this would increase traffic ? Is it a good idea? Thanks!
Content Development | | BobGW1 -
Starting a brand new blog today - Is it still Wordpress?
Hi I started a blog in 2006 on Blogspot, then everyone moved onto Tumblr and Wordpress, but in August (just) 2013, what should I be starting my brand new blog on? I dont want to have to migrate in a matter on months.
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
What are the best wordpress theme clubs
Hi, i am looking for the best theme clubs out there for wordpress, i am looking for clubs that offer support and also ones that have a forum that you can share ideas as well as get support. any suggestions would be great
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848861 -
Best place for a blog blog.mydomain.com or mydomain.com/blog
We have used blogs on a good number of client sites and always got good results from having them. However do you feel its best to have a blog as a subdomain or included in the site ie blog.mydomain.com or mydomain.com/blog
Content Development | | tempowebdesign0 -
What's the best RSS Feed Pluggin for Wordpress?
I need to add an RSS feed for my Wordpress blog. Which one is the best to use? How can I maximize my RSS feed once I have it ? I'm thinking Technorati but what other places should I place it?
Content Development | | bronxpad0 -
Meta Title and Description Placement in Wordpress
I noticed in wordpress code that the <title>and <description> are not at the top of the code and rather located a ways down the code and not displayed how previous sites used to be.</p> <p>Does this still matter for SEO.</p> <p>I thought it should have been,</p> <div id="syn_row5" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">title</span>></span><span class="HTML_TAG"></<span class="HTML_ELM">title</span>></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_ROW"> <div id="syn_row6" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">meta</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">name</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">"Description"</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">content</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">""</span> /></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"> <div id="syn_row6" class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><<span class="HTML_ELM">meta</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">name</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">"Keywords"</span> <span class="HTML_ATR">content</span>=<span class="HTML_VAL">""</span> /> (if still needed ?)</span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"> </span></span></span></span></div> <div class="SYN_TXT"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG"><span class="HTML_TXT"><span class="HTML_TAG">Is there a way to do this in Wordpress? Or does placment not matter anymore?</span></span></span></span></span></span></div> </span></span></div> </div></title>
Content Development | | hfranz0