Sunday, March 2, 2014

Mysterious traffic

I was just looking at my blog's stats and in the last few days people have taken an interest in my post about a sunrise at dead horse point. The amount of traffic is quite extraordinary. This is just a day:

This is the statistics on the smugmug gallery that the images are hosted from:

That's with only 1/3 of March 2 done by now, so it seems that sunday will be a 4000 image day too. Somebody big must have started linking to it as these images don't draw a lot of traffic normally. Strangely, I cannot figure out what triggered the traffic as google analytics does not show the origin of the traffic. As the graph above shows, my smugmug site (which serves up the images) shows the traffic quite well, but of course thinks it comes from my blog. These are some of my favorite images and it's nice if people enjoy them but I am still curious where the traffic came from.

Cradled
Cradled. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 24 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.

EDIT: 3/2/14. This is probably a consequence of referer spam. Traffic generated by bots hoping to generate links back to them. Evil spammers.

2 comments:

  1. Well its nice to be popular, but a pisser to be taken for granted. Have you tried googling for your image name?

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    1. Obakesan, I think these are just evil spammers - automated traffic basically. The traffic is back to normal after two days. A friend made a funny joke where he asked me whether I had heard of this new band that suddenly got extremely popular, "the Dead Horse Point" that everybody was googling for.

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