Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Ok, so generally my blog does not get a lot of traffic. That is admittedly my fault, because I don't get a chance to post as much as I would like.

However, I found a spike in my traffic on May 15th. Almost 500 page views. I didn't even make a post that day!

Anyone have an answer to this weird phenomenon or had a similar experience?

CV

Bloggers been having a lot of issues lately, I believe we even mentioned this one toward the end of this thread viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3778 I stopped trying to figure out what's going on. I might just rip my blog out and start over somewhere else.

Which blog service are you using? Blogger, Wordpress, something else...?

If you're using Blogger, go to your dashboard and click the link that says "Stats" for that blog. That should take you to a page that should show you where your incoming traffic came from (under "Traffic Sources"). I'm pretty sure Wordpress has a similar feature. They're not super accurate, but they give you a rough idea.

For the future, you can also incorporate Google Analytics. If you have a Google account, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign in, then set up a new account for your blog. There are instructions for you to follow to set it up. Basically, in entails generating a code and posting it inside your blog's usual HTML. The instructions will tell you where.

There are a number of reasons for a spike in traffic - usually it means somebody linked your post somewhere and a bunch of people clicked. It can also come from being listed in the blog feed of a popular blog, or something being shared a bunch on Twitter/StumbleUpon/Digg. Sometimes it's just that your blog got linked on a random site by a "spider" (a bot program that scans the Internet) and the site's pumping a bunch of views into your blog to try and get you to click back and check them out. Those are usually sites trying to sell something.

Hope that helps!

If you are using Blogger, your analytics aren't very accurate to begin with. Google Analytics, as maybegenius mentioned, will give you more accurate information. (And a lot of it)

You can get spikes too for several reasons - a crawler for a search engine finally found you for the first time. You ended up being linked on some random page somewhere. Blogger's stats are incredibly untrustworthy though, so unless you have a good analytics like Google working on your site, you can't tell where or why they showed up.

Wordpress.com has a built in analytics that is fine. I don't know much about how it works. You can download a plugin for Wordpress.org sites that is very accurate and removes your own hits so it doesn't skew the results.

Well, I don't use either. My website is run through Squarespace Inc. with it's own independent blogging platform. Oh well, I must live with the mystery I guess.

CV

CharleeVale wrote:Oh well, I must live with the mystery I guess.

CV

It sounds like you got mentioned on a blog or Twitter account with a large following. This can often bring a large temporary spike in traffic.

CharleeVale wrote:Well, I don't use either. My website is run through Squarespace Inc. with it's own independent blogging platform. Oh well, I must live with the mystery I guess.

CV

Do you have access to your blog's HTML code at all? Like, can you access it to change your layout and such? If so, you should still be able to set up Google Analytics