Trying to Determine Source of Traffic Surge

[gouri]

For a one-hour interval yesterday, I received a lot more traffic than I did during the other one-hour intervals of the day. This is the most that I can narrow the time frame.

I also looked at the traffic levels of one-hour intervals on other days and I didn’t see a similar traffic level. What I saw during the one-hour interval yesterday was a lot higher. The traffic came from the U.S., and I also noticed that the impressions to different pages of the site were around the same number.

I don't believe that the traffic came from search engine queries.

I am trying to determine where the traffic might have come from?

Also, is it possible that this traffic surge was not from human visits?

I appreciate your thoughts. I would really like to have some understanding of what might have caused such a surge in traffic.

[mack]

These things do happen from time to time, and sometimes it can take a while to discover the source. One example of mines was a site being mentioned (un-linked) in a newsletter with large circulation. It caused a large spike in traffic lasting several days. I eventually discovered the source when It started appearing in serps after various sources published the said newsletter.

Only your raw logs will help establish the possibility of it not being human visitors. What sort of spike are you talking?

Mack.

[Digmen1]

StatCounter is good at showing where hits come from imho

[gouri]

@Digmen1,

Thanks.

Only your raw logs will help establish the possibility of it not being human visitors. What sort of spike are you talking?

@mack,

I apologize for not writing sooner. I had not looked at this thread for a couple of weeks.

I believe that the spike that I saw occurred during a one-hour interval on one day and after that, I have not seen something similar to this.

Another thing that I should mention is that the impressions to different pages of the site during this interval are around the same.

Does this help to figure out what it could be?

[Receptional]

>the impressions to different pages of the site during this interval are around the same

So do you mean that the surge was to ONE page or to ALL the pages? If one page, then I'll go with Mack's guess. You can use a backlink checker to see if you got new links - but more likely put your domain into a twitter search and see if people inked to it. If it is all pages then I would expect a spider and I am assuming that you are looking at raw logs rather than logs generated from a script on your page. Spiders visiting your site is generally a GOOD thing, because the content usually then ends up being indexed somewhere, somehow, but if you only have a few visitors a day, then a spider can seem big, because the behaviour is unusuay compared to a human.

[gouri]

So do you mean that the surge was to ONE page or to ALL the pages?

@Receptional,

The surge was to ALL pages, and I saw this in the Adsense impressions.

Could it be a spider if I am seeing this in Adsense?

[Receptional]

Could it be a spider if I am seeing this in Adsense?

I'd call it a "scraper" rather than a spider. But I doubt it was human. If you go to the log files, you will probably find they came from a limited IP address range.

[gouri]

I'd call it a "scraper" rather than a spider. But I doubt it was human. If you go to the log files, you will probably find they came from a limited IP address range.

@Receptional,

I am able to see IP addresses for a period of time; I can't see them for a particular day. That has made it tough for me to determine where these impressions are from.

Do you think that this was some sort of scraper bot that visited the pages of the site repeatedly in a short period of time?