Google Searches Up but Traffic the Same?!

My logs show an increase in search traffic but not overall traffic?

[abezgauz]

Could someone explain an anomaly that has occured in my logs this past month, as well as 11 months ago. According to webtrends, there were over 120,000 searches last month when a typical month is 2000. All keywords are alos up. I would normally love this, except that the unique visitors last month and the unique visitors this month are about the same. Could this be some type of automated program hitting my site?

[Matt Probert]

The term "unique visitors" is misleading. They mean IP address. This may be a firewall, dynamically allocatted address, Internet Cafe terminal, a cache. It bears no resemblance to any person living or dead.

Matt

[abezgauz]

I understand about the unique visitors, but overall visitors are the same as well. Its only Google results and keywords that are up about 2500%!

[ogletree]

If you spend a lot of time looking at the logs and set up some good filters you should get a better idea. I have had months where I got hit hard by scrapers and other that did not. It may just be that you were not hit hard by scrapers this month.

[cgrantski]

If you don't use a persistent cookie, don't even look at the unique visitors statistic because, as Matt said, it mainly corresponds to IP (well, IP concatenated with User Agent). This means that if you get a ton of traffic from major ISPs, the unique visitors will simply correspond to the number of available proxies in that universe (times the number of likely user agent combinations if WebTrends is identifying visitors/sessions by IP concatenated with User Agent).

If you do use a persistent cookie, unique visitors will be much more accurate and will pretty much correspond to an individual machine except for error introduced by turning off or wiping out cookies.

If you use only a session cookie, look at visits, not unique visitors. Same for no cookie, though it's a lot dicier.

To see if something's hitting your site hard, look at the Visitors report, which will list individual visitors (as best as possible) and show the number of visits and page views for each. Look for either a massive number of visits for an individual visitor, or a huge ratio of page views to visits. Once you've found suspicious ones, you can backtrack to find the IP, organization, whatever.

You can do the same kind of thing with the Visiting Organizations or Visiting Domains reports - look for big visit numbers from an individual organization, or not-so-many visits but huge quantities of hits per visit.