What can cause wild fluctations in page views ?

One day 400, the next 40,000 - what's happening ?

[fom2001uk]

One of our recent logs shows two days where WebTrends reports massive increases in page views.
The average is around 400 or 500 per day. But this report shows one day at almost 40,000, and another at 13,000, both well in excess of anything this site has ever achieved.

My first thought is this is an INTERNAL thing, clearly something we're doing at our end. Total visits haven't changed so there is no increase in visitor activity.

Any ideas what can cause massive increases in page views like this ?

[Brett_Tabke]

And you are saying there wasn't an equal number of visitor increases?

Can't you track it back to see where the traffic came from? Whether it was just one rogue spider or something?

Dig into those logs man!

[fom2001uk]

Absolutely Brett, no increase in total visits !!

I don't know how to track the source of these page views because I'm not sure which pages are getting these huge numbers. It isn't the homepage.

I think I need to extend the top pages in the WebTrends report to include every page on the site.
That might give me a clue. I'll do that now and let you know what I find.

[dcheney]

I had a recent incident where another site made me their "site of the week" and used my site banner loading from my server. In this case I had a sudden dramatic rise in loads of that 1 gif image as everyone who visited the other site was getting that image from me!

So be sure to check image files!

[brotherhood of LAN]

I have also had a situation where I was serving ads from someone elses server - and there were 40 000 requests for the banners, but strangely not recorded on my site stats.

what dcheney describes sounds like a "most likely" solution IMO :)

[Woz]

I also had a recent incident where another very well know site made me their "site of the day". I was wondering what was happening until I looked in the logs and found all those referrals from the SOTD page. As Brett says, it will be in the logs, just go looking for it.

Onya
Woz