Can someone please tell me about the referrers/hosts

and can they affect your visitor numbers?

[netchicken1]

Last month I had a massive plummet in my visitor numbers by up to 50%. At that time a new referrer / host appeared in my Awstats package, which had taken an abnormal amount of hits and pages. 100% more than the next referrer crawl.ip-range.googlebot.

I changed IPs at the end of the month and the offending site never returned and my stats recovered to normal.

Now last night my visitor numbers plumeted again, and a new referrer/host has appeared in the stats again taking 100% more hits that the googlebot.

I have never encountered this in the past at all. Looking over previous months nothing like this has ever happened to my site.

Is it possible that there is a relationship between the hosts/referrers and the decline in hits on the site? These are not "normal" hits, but massively over the level expected.

Can the hosts be caching the site and also affecting the adsense income? I have the "allowed sites" feature turned on and ther eis othing in there about it.

Can I IP ban the host?
Could it be a form of attack?
Am I the only person noticing these things?

[sbb1982]

may be somebody is copying your site?

[vordmeister]

Do you know who this referrer/host is? If you can download your raw log files and search them using the info you have (IP or host name maybe) then you can get a whole load of other info - IP, browser etc. For me it's normally Yahoo Slurp that goes mad from time to time.

Wouldn't have thought extra traffic from one source would reduce traffic from another unless it overloads an already overloaded server.