Who's in Virginia?

Why is our site so popular there?

[John_Caius]

Our site is a major informational database serving about 3-4 million pageviews per month. Our webstats show almost 20% of our traffic from Virginia (3000 sessions over the last two days alone), compared with 8% from the UK and 5% for the next US state, New Jersey. This is a regular feature of our traffic, not something that only happens around Google crawls for example. Is there a reason why we get so much traffic from this particular state?

[edit_g]

Are you looking at webtrends? The geographical stats aren't too hot at all- I would discount these completely.

[pmac]

I am pretty sure you are seeing AOL proxy servers.

[rcjordan]

>seeing AOL proxy servers.

Ditto. I believe all AOL users are lumped together, geographically.

[John_Caius]

We're using Livestats 5.0 - a creaking old 19th century webstats program provided by our host. The listed search engines include Yahoo, Looksmart, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, Webcrawler and Altavista - which makes optimising for Google quite awkward as you only get keyword analysis for listed SEs!

I think you're probably right about AOL proxy servers - do they all come out of Virginia?

Methinks we should invest in a better webstats program. Any suggestions for something that's good for serious optimisation with high traffic? The analysis we use a lot includes:

keywords
entry pages
sessions
page views
page views per session
time per session
international location breakdown

Thanks. :)

[toadhall]

Worldcom/uunet?

[starec]

Maybe its the CIA headquarters in Langley?;)

[Key_Master]

I've tracked unusual spikes in traffic from individual states to radio broadcasts and news reports. Something to take into consideration.

[John_Caius]

CIA? Dunno, but we're a medical reference site and our most popular page is scabies... ;)

[pageoneresults]

Reston, Virginia

I believe this is where one of AOL's major hubs are. There are others and they are easy to spot by the number of visitors coming from them.

[cornwall]

Yes, its AOL.

Tends to make regional web stats for the USA a bit meaningless.

However the same sort of thing exists with UK web stats, when dot com sites get listed as USA in origin, whereas many are UK browsers.

I would accept that the reverse argument applies, in other words USA stats are boosted by dotcom browsers from around the world.

All goes to show how fragile web analysis is ;)

There are lies, damn lies and there are web stats.

[cfx211]

AOL server farms. The real pain is that they are a bunch of caching servers, so you never really know how many people on AOL are really looking at your site.

All you know is that a couple of hundred servers are always making requests from your site and caching your content on their servers. I think that about 5 of the top 10 IPs making requests from us resolve to AOL servers in Reston VA.

If everything is dynamic then you are in luck because you can't really cache that much of the site, but if you are static and a consumer site well add another X in the equation.

[Bradley]

I live in Northern Virginia.... I used to work for UUNET, and I've seen their NOC (Network Operations Center). It totally reminded me of the War Room in the Petagon. Amazingly impressive.

I've also been on AOL's campus.......Once again, very impressive.........A massive amount of internet traffic flows in and out of Fairfax County.

[bmcgee]

I wouldn't go so far as to say the geographical data is worthless. It depends on what you are using for a reporting tool.

If you run the latest version of WebTrends, I highly recommend getting GeoTrends (free add-on) from NetIQ. It's a database mapping IPs to actual locations.

Rather than all AOL IPs resolving to Virginia, each one is now mapped to the location of the dialup.

While it's not perfect, it certainly provides benefit and makes this data far from worthless.

We have clients who are interested in specific markets where they have physical presences. Imagine the ability to watch web traffic increase as a result of instore marketing for the web site. There's plenty of value there for clients.

[amznVibe]

There is a way to unhook the AOL client from the proxy, but of course getting AOL visitors do such a thing would be impossible. The compressed graphics are annoying enough and most AOL users have no idea they can easily turn that off as well.

[vitaplease]

54 % of my visits from the US are Virginia according to Webtrends!
California is second with 19%.

Next to AOL, I always thought Google would have its most important data center there and that Webtrends would see a Google search referral as that visit.
(80% of my SE referrals are Google).

If its not Google than the majority of AOL users are preferring plain Google search to AOL/Google search?