Str82u - 4:28 pm on Dec 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

But keep in mind that we are now 10 days away from xmas and traffic patterns shift wildly around this time, naturally.

That's true for us, especially last night since it was a Friday AND the 15th of the month is today; we aren't an ecom site.

What it doesn't explain are SERPs churning the way they have been. My last post mentions it settling down for us and it seems to have after a full 7 day week. The only major difference in our main 2/3 word keyphrases are that one domain/one-pagename and another domain/another-pagename have switched positions - really weird.

@Tedster - Up until this week the keyword traffic for "(not provided)" has been very close to "Unique Visitors" in % to whatever we are +/- overall when compared to the previous week or more, within a percentage point on a daily basis. I believe, on most days, that's just an reflection of internet activity. This week has been different and "(not provided)" is lower than the overall (or the average of real keyword shortage) but it's such a variance between days that it's hard to say positively if there is a correlation. What we have been experiencing nearly all year is that if "(not provided)" is coming up short through the day, the total uniques will be short. EDIT: the Uniques total will be short by about the same %.

Since I believe most of the "(not provided)" traffic is from custom search box results on other people sites, we're figuring those sites took a hit too and the variance has been the result of other people's fluctuations.

We do not mind much about the fake downloads as we have flat rate bandwidth but I try to figure out what’s the purpose of all this downloads from same IP´s

is someone hotlinking to your files? I get similar traffic from those trying to use our bandwidth thinking it's metered but we don't have anything downloadable.