Topic: Blog Tech Question: What's Bringing Thousands of Hits to One Page?

[Jean Reidy]

I have a BlogSpot blog and it gets a fair amount of traffic.

But it seems like - in the last few months - one particular page from February of 2011 is getting an unusual number of hits. It's really skewing my stats. And I can't quite figure out what's drawing hits to that page.

It was a Valentines Day post so I have a picture of a heart on the page. My stats show that some visitors entered on a "heart" search time. I'm wondering if I should take the image off that page for a while and see if the hits go down.

It's not a big deal, but I'm trying to make sure it's nothing evil or sinister that lurks in the deepest depths of my blog code, far beyond where my non-techy brain might take me.

Thoughts?
Jean

[Andrea B]

Out of curiosity, do you also get the referring page information in your stats? If you have Blogspot, it might be possible to sign up with StatCounter (it's free) and see where your referring links come from and where your exit pages are. I believe what I did was add their code to the HTML code for the theme I used. Either that or I used a sidebar HTML widget to add an invisible hit counter.

I don't get thousands of hits on one page, but I do get most of my traffic on my (non-writing) blog from a few pages that have high search engine visibility and also Pinterest because those posts are related to organizing and DIY projects that are popular on Pinterest.

I'm wondering if your heart image is getting the hits because people are sharing it on sites like Pinterest and the traffic is coming to you to find the source? Do you have a link to the post in question? If the heart image is yours, there are a couple of ways to check and see if it has been used elsewhere. For instance, an image search called TinEye. Also Google Image search (you can right-click on your image to copy the link and then paste it into Google and select image search.)

To check if you have been pinned to Pinterest and shared and that link is bringing traffic to your site (which is great if you are wanting to attract traffic), you can type "http://pinterest.com/source/Your_Blog_Address_Here_Minus_http://www). For instance, I can see what people have pinned from my page on my now pretty much ignored organizing blog by putting http://pinterest.com/source/behindcloseddrawers.wordpress.com. If you go there, you'll see a bunch of spray painted white branches against the background of a teal wall I used to have.

It is also possible bots have found that page based on the topic being popular and have tried to get you to click back to their salesy or bogus website. So look and see if you have referring links to weird places.

If I think of anything else I'll let you know. Hopefully, some of this will be helpful. I used to have a Blogspot blog, but then I switched to Wordpress and I haven't gone back (although, let me tell you, I really miss being able to adjust my line spacing and fonts). Wordpress has plug-ins like Akismet that help block comment spam and it has been useful in showing me what blog posts are most susceptible to spam.

[mghiggins]

"Heart" is such a common image-search word. I have a feeling that's exactly what's skewing your stats. I'd suggest removing the image and see if that helps.

[Jean Reidy]

Thanks Andrea and MG. I did look at referrals and "heart" seems to be the culprit. So, I removed the "heart" image and the word "heart" from the blog title. We'll see what happens. I'm also going to check out that nifty Pinterest link you sent me and see if my blog has been pinned in any way.
I'll let you know what I find out.
Jean

[Jean Reidy]

So based on the referring URLs, it looks like the heart image brought people to that page. I've since removed the image and the the word "heart" from the post and yet today there are still hundreds of hits. And the referring URL is the old heart image. I'm wondering what would happen if I deleted the post all together.
Any thoughts on what's happening here?
Jean

[Jean Reidy]

One more tidbit - when I go to Google images, on the first page, there's an image of a heart that sends folks to my blog. I've deleted that image from everywhere - including the online Picassa album that stores photos for my blog. I don't get this.
Jean

[deblyfe]

It's great that you could figure out what was bringing unnecessary views to your blog.   I can't recall if someone suggested that you click to turn off the counter from counting each time you view your own blog.


I use blogspot as well.  Many of my views are from bots I think and unfortunately.  I am not sure how much I trust the stats, as the numbers don't tend to make sense when I track them. 

[mghiggins]

Just a suggestion for the future: Before posting pictures to your blog, or storing in Picassa, give the image file a nonsense or coded name. That should keep it from coming up in searches. Good luck!

[Brian H.]

Jean,

It's possible the hits continue coming because Google hasn't crawled your site again, or not crawled it entirely and come across your deletions. Once it does that, their search engine should be updated.  There are times I change a post title or something similar and it's a couple weeks sometimes before Google search pages reflect that change.

Also, you can search for something i.e. a blog post that has been deleted and use the "cached" feature in Google results and go back to the old page. I'm not sure if that would show up on stats or not, but possibly.

Nevertheless, there's probably nothing evil lurking in your code etc. The only thing to be aware of when you viewing your stats  would be multiple hits from the Ukraine or Russia. That's when I get concerned. So many spammers over in the former USSR.  Spammers are so evil.

Brian

[Jean Reidy]

Thanks, guys. I actually found a feature in Google that allows you to refresh their crawler - essentially telling them the old page/link/photo no longer exists at that address and it seemed to have worked.
Jean

[Brian H.]

Sounds great. Please share the link. That will come in handy.

Thanks,
Brian

[Jean Reidy]

It's a Google content removal request. Here's the link:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1
Jean

[Franzilla]

Jean,

It's possible the hits continue coming because Google hasn't crawled your site again, or not crawled it entirely and come across your deletions. Once it does that, their search engine should be updated.  There are times I change a post title or something similar and it's a couple weeks sometimes before Google search pages reflect that change.

Also, you can search for something i.e. a blog post that has been deleted and use the "cached" feature in Google results and go back to the old page. I'm not sure if that would show up on stats or not, but possibly.

Nevertheless, there's probably nothing evil lurking in your code etc. The only thing to be aware of when you viewing your stats  would be multiple hits from the Ukraine or Russia. That's when I get concerned. So many spammers over in the former USSR.  Spammers are so evil.

Brian

If you're going to keep an eye out for spammers, you'd be better off looking at hits from the US or India! Both of those countries are responsible for more spam than Russia.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/top-spam-sending-countries_n_1446187.html#slide=896804