Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Most of my new traffic comes from multiples of terms that hadn't been searched in prior periods. Sure, that could happen, but not for some of them.
For example, the exact phrase "a painter paints pictures on canvas. but musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~leopold stokowski" was supposedly searched three times in the past two weeks. The chances of that being searched by three different people? Nil. Why would one person search a term that specific 3 times?
Another, "a heart of ice by ariadne president" was searched 3 times on one day.
And there's "lipstick on a pig audio" and "does margerine go bad" getting 4 and 3 respectively.
Mine is a social networking site for artists and writers so almost anything could appear on the site, but not multiples of these searches.
Need I say more. Does anyone have an idea what's happening here?
Secondly - spammers seem to be ripping unusual phrases out of sites and using them as Spam Titles, if this is done it could lead to a spate of searches on an unusual phrase.
I searched my site for "lipstick on a pig" and found nothing. Audio is very common on the site.
The Firefox answer is interesting and a possibility, but it would mean that an awful lot of restarts are happening for people visiting my site, something that doesn't seem likely, especially when these recurrences aren't all on a single day.
The spam idea might make sense, but I didn't bother to mention a lot of simple keywords and phrases that appeared a lot, but seem to be nearly as unusual in their frequency.
Additionally, this statistical anomaly was common to the more popular search engines, although Google was most guilty. Compared to a seemingly untainted period in July, Google traffic was up 1079%. Yahoo was up 173% and AOL was up 259%. From AOL we got 16 hits on "a1a43c0236c914bcb851d1a899a9faaa" over 3 consecutive days. Got an answer for that one?
...supposedly searched three times in the past two weeks. The chances of that being searched by three different people? Nil. Why would one person search a term that specific 3 times?
User search behavior doesn't always appear logical at first glance, some queries the same. One of my sites gets repeated referrals from very specific long-tail queries similar to your example quite often. Turns out folks are usually trying to find answers for the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Keyword phrase "poetry writers" gets 20+ visits over a week, all coming from one city, most going to our home page where this phrase would not occur. The visits are not identical.
A similar pattern is keying off the name of our COO whose name appears only on the About Us page. He may have searched on his own name once, but it shows repeatedly, and stats indicate it is coming from our office and his, the only Mac, computer in the office. It too is almost exclusively landing on our home page where his name has never appeared.
Too bizarre for words.
D-Web Blend27
We added code from Hitlink that does not agree with GA, so we'll be taking this to G if we can find anyone there who is interested. The initial inquiry I sent to them lost their interest when they saw that it was GA problem and not click fraud. They said they'd pass it along and we MIGHT hear from someone.
Ended up finding that operators of other sites in my segment were doing some competitive analysis.
