How are so many hits possible?

I'm getting too much traffic

[johnneumann]

After being online for almost three years, I saw my traffic numbers this week for the first time ever. I'm getting over 100 hits a day.

I own a tiny little rinky-dink seminar business and hardly anyone knows who I am. There's no reason for ten people to have visited my site every day this month, let alone a hundred.

Question: If someone types in a key word into, say, Google.com and my site shows up on page 35 of all the choices available, does Google having found me and thrown me into this long list trigger a count on my traffic register? I'm assuming that because I'm buried on page 35, no one is actually clicking on me.

Second question, how else could I account for so many hits? Again, no one knows who I am and I am not at all aggressive submitting myself to search engines.

My only guess is that popular keywords have my included on the line-up (although in the very back) and that the search engine finding me constitues a hit.

Is that how it works?

Thanks,
Mr. So-New-At-This

[diamondgrl]

Log files are notoriously difficult to interpret if you are not used to looking at them.

Are they hits (a file being accessed, such as an image file) or page views (a real live page)? There can easily be a 10-fold difference in the numbers, depending on your site design. Also, do you know that they are real files and not some silly bot trying to probe the server for security weaknesses by looking for files that don't exist?

Also, did you check to see how many were from search engine spiders and which were regular browsers?

[johnneumann]

The Earthlink counter says they are views of my home page.

?

[sem4u]

Check your backlinks. Your site may have been featured on another website or forum recently.

[bruhaha]

Do you have access to your actual site user logs, or at least some simple log analysis summaries, to check out where your visitors are coming from?

Counters are notoriously unreliable (e.g., they may reset and count a "new visitor" whenever someone refreshes or returns to the page on the same visit). Even the best counters do not provide the detail you need to track exactly what your visitors do when they do while at your site, much less how they got there.

That said, there are many ways you can suddenly get a lot of new traffic. For example, one visitor posting some positive comments about your site in a relevant location (e.g., a "site review") can easily lead to such an influx. But you likely won't know about that sort of thing without some log analysis (unless someone happens to drop you an email about it).

If you have trouble getting the log info, you might possibly get some clue by searching to see how your site ranks on major search engines for your most prominent keywords. Or you might have success using a simple feedback form somewhere on your site that includes the question "how did you find us?"

[hannamyluv]

yeah, raw logs are a good thing. I hadn't looked at ours in a few months (It all comes out in processed reports so I don't look at the raw logs often). Took a peek yesterday. Darn ia_archiver spider hit our site 80,000 in three weeks! Dumb spider. Blocked it, but seeing your raw logs will help catch little things like that.

[Lorel]

I had the same result the last 3 months on 3 of my 14 sites--visitors doubled. I'm using a counter which allows me to check the referral links and nothing has changed--most are from Google, then Yahoo (Google) and MSN and other smaller engines which is the same as before. There is no evidence that it came from somebody featuring my sites and very few "unknown" referrers.

So my only conclusion was it had something to do with Google.

[slade7]

100 hits a day... I get twice that from my host's perl script that monitors the server at regular intervals... so it could easily be that.