"Hits" Nearly Doubled, Other Stats Normal

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"Hits" Nearly Doubled, Other Stats Normal

WTH does it mean?

Dolemite

7:37 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Over the past few days, the "hits" statistic for my site has nearly doubled over normal levels, while UVs, page views, and bandwidth have only been up modestly. Hits increased by 70% from one day to the next, and have been up ever since. I know its a fairly useless statistic, but I'm still wondering what this might mean. I really don't care what it signifies from a traffic perspective, the other stats are more meaningful to me in that area, but I'm a little concerned that it might be up due to image leeching, or some other malicious activity. My error logs don't show anything out of the ordinary. My initial instinct suggests your basic image leeching, but I really don't have much in the way of tasty images on this site.

Any idea on what this might be, or what to look for to figure it out?

tedster

7:47 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I'd think that image leeching would still show as a significant jump in bandwidth.

So, how is your 404 error log looking?

Dolemite

7:53 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Yeah, that would make sense.

Error log is clean...just 404's for the robots.txt that isn't there.

storevalley

8:11 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Could also be some kind of image bot. I have seen similar blips on a couple of my sites. One of the culprits was Links SQL (I won't post the URL ... but this is pretty easy to find using Google). psbot was another.

rrdega

11:54 am on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Take a look at this thread: What is this in my logs? [webmasterworld.com]

Are you showing this type of activity? If so, welcome to the club!

claus

1:31 pm on Aug 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

If your pageviews are normal and your hits are doubled, the explanation is pretty straightforward: Some other elements than pages are getting requested more than before.

It could be image leeching. It could also be that you have implemented a design change that uses more images per page, or an extra call to a script, include, stylesheet, or JS-file (or whatever).

If you're sure that you have not made design changes in this period, then look for non-GET requests - have you got a lot of linkcheckers HEAD-ing? Form-POST-ing?

If these are stable as well, i think you can assume the image leeching is taking place.

/claus