In light of the recent massive increase in hits my blog has achieved, I decided to see which are my three top blog posts. The results were somewhat surprising. They were (according to the blog's stats summary):
- Thursday, 16 July 2015: Le Chant L'Oignon (The Onion Song) lyrics (41.8k* or 50.6k*)
- Saturday, 20 February 2016: Simulating gunfire in naval wargames: Fred Jane and Fletcher Pratt (13.7k* or 18.4k*)
- Tuesday, 25 April 2017: Travel Battle: A review of the latest offering from Perry Miniatures (10.1k* or 20.9k*)
If the upsurge in hits was purely down to AI bots 'visiting' my blog, I would expect the peaks in the above graphs to all be towards the right-hand side (i.e. the past few months) ... but my second most read blog post peaked when it was written and has not experienced a recent spike.
Interesting ...
As I write this blog post on Saturday evening, the number of hits are as follows:
- Today: 20,656 hits
- Yesterday: 56,694 hits
- This month: 194,457 hits ... which is a daily average of 27.780 hits
- Last month: 998,902 hits ... which is a daily average of 35,675 hits
This would seem to indicate that the recent upsurge in hits is beginning to tail off ... a bit.
* What I do not understand is why each of the blog posts featured above seems to generate two different view totals. On the summary, each has a total that indicates the number of views it has generated ... but when one looks at each post separately, that figure is higher. I have looked on Blogger for a reason for this, but I could not find anything to help me resolve this conundrum.
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Your footnote is an interesting observation that I have noticed as well. Often the page view counts under "Posts" in the dashboard can exceed the page view counts in the "Stats" dashboard. This anomaly does not occur in reverse. I put this down to either one of two possibilities.
ReplyDelete(1) Summary statistics adjust for spam or bot hits (but not AI searches) or
(2) "Stats" shows a lag to the "Posts" totals. I have noticed that "Stats" may catch up to "Posts" counts over time.
I reckon it could be a combination of both.
Jonathan Freitag,
DeleteI suspect that the two possibilities you outline in your comment could easily account for the apparent discrepancy in the number of hits experienced by individual blog posts. I only wish that Blogger would make it easy to find the reason why this happens.
All the best,
Bob
I've experienced something similar with blogger Bob. Until September/October last year I had some few blogposts which were top-posts relatively constant. After September/October that changed and new posts peaked and became the new top-posts. After the 'blog tsunami' last autumn these 'newer posts keeps peaking even if the visiting numbers are closer to 'normal' again.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if there are any connections to your increasingly numbers of hits, but on the same time my own blog gets increasingly more redirections from UK and your blog Bob.
Let's hope there are some real readers amongst these hits.
Roger,
DeleteOver the past few years my blog has experienced several periods when the number of hits has rocketed up, followed by periods of what I would think of as normal activity.
This time the period of high activity seems to have been much longer than before, and currently doesn't show any sign of ending.
One reason my blog might be attracting more hits is my use of hotlinks to other people's blogs and websites. This seems to trigger some search algorithms ... and directs blog readers (and AI bots) towards those blogs and websites.
All the best,
Bob