problem with site statistics

I have something strange going on with my site statistics since the last three days.

as you can see most URL referers com from a specific site:

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it is a forum on pokemon (why me dear god)

http://s6.invisionfree.com/Pokemon_X/index.php?act=idx

I'm doubting however that I am getting many visitors from them. I am also using statcounter and that doesn't show anything.

Does anyone have a clue what is going on here?

I have found one link on the forum to my site

http://s6.invisionfree.com/Pokemon_X/index.php?showtopic=213

Could it be that one of the users constantly switches back and forth between their forum and my site? Because many of the links on the list I showed an image of don't have any links to my site.

 

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Perhaps they're linking to images on your site? If so, I would suggest finding the image they are using and swap it with something grossly indecent as a disincentive for them stealing your bandwidth.

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Ouch. I remember that happened to me a few times when I used images on this forum. That'll teach me to leach bandwidth from somethingawful.com.

Spurious, maybe somebody is playing a joke on you? Can I link you in my blog?

 

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Well it seems that Kenji has put your site up in the Links section of that site, and when you look at the front page of the site, His Links section would have shown a new addition and therefore people might have checked the newly added link out.

I can see any image leeching, and if there was you would have seen it in your logs I'm sure (If you've got a decent logging system it will tell you how many times a file is pulled)

I wouldn't worry about it too much Spurious, it's not like it's a site about Beastiality or Canabilism lol

 

I'm now just keeping an eye on my bandwidth. To see if it matters. Probably not.

It is just a shame that I cannot see my other referers anymore because the list is filled up with these particular ones.

 

I noticed now that Lycos has changed the system. Previously you needed to have a javascript line in your code. Apparently that is not necessary anymore. They say they keep track of your statistics automatically.

I wonder if this is the origin of the current 'problems'.

I now have to remove all the java code from all the pages. Nice....

 

Na ja,

I send an email to the forum administrator to ask nicely what was going on. I had to register as a member to do that.

Now I am deleted as a member and I never received a reply.

Uh, that wasn't very nice...

 

update:

I think the statistics are screwed up by spiders and bots.

I noticed suddenly that google is nowadays updating my frontpage on a daily basis. I suspect it is because of spiders and bots coming from the pokemon forum. Hence the forum is all over on my URL referer list.

nice theory or not?

 

Well you don't have a certain META tag that might come in useful.
If you place this META tag in the documents header, it can help Robots decide "When to spider you".

Code:

< META HTTP-EQUIV="Revisit-After" CONTENT="14 Days" >

Note the actual way it works, is it tells the spider when it should check for new contents.

Another method you could use is this META tag, again for placing in your HEAD tags.

Code:

< META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Wed 05 Jun 2004 08:21:57 GMT" >

You can stack this with the Revisit, What this does is actually tell the mainframe the robots report to when to Expire it's cache, which will in turn force it to come back to your site and look for an update.

To Help it know when you have updated, make sure you use this META tags in your HEAD tag:

Code:

< META HTTP-EQUIV="Date-Created" CONTENT="Wed 05 Jun 2004 08:21:57 GMT" >

This is a way of allowing the mainframe to work out when a page has been updated, Other than taking to document created/modified date from your page (Which can sometimes be false)

Don't forget if you are fed up with the spider appearing too much, you can always use a disallow in your Robots text.

Code:

User-agent: *
Allow: *

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *
Disallow: /*.htm