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Ask the Experts: What could explain a spike in…

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: Our website averages about 5,000 hits per day. Then one day a few months ago it inexplicably jumped to around 15,000 hits, but it was just for that one day. They dropped right back down the next day. I was wondering, what could cause this? We didn’t have any special events or press releases that day. Nothing out of the ordinary happened in our company. Any ideas?

A: There are various reasons that traffic on a site can spike in the way you’ve described. As you mention, you would often expect to see that type of behavior when there is an unusual event, press release, or other online promotion that might cause more visitors to come to the site. These days, a sudden, short-lived increase in traffic might be a result of getting some notice on a social networking system such as digg, reddit or del.icio.us.

Another, less delightful possibility is that the site was repeatedly hit by some sort of robot. This could be a search engine robot or an undesirable visitor such as a scraper bot (bots that are coming to the site to steal its content) or other spam manifestation. And if the site is dynamic, sometimes it is possible for a bot to get into an infinite loop and bounce around the website for a while, which could throw off your statistics.

Your best bet at finding the answer to this mystery will be checking your log files or website analytics program. I would start by checking referrers on the day in question – this is a quick way to see if there’s a link in some prominent website that you were unaware of. If this doesn’t answer your question, then you might want to review the part of your stats where it tells you what type of browsers or spiders (usually called User-agents in analytics programs) were visiting. Look for unusually high numbers from certain user agents or any other striking activities here.

And the big take-away from all of this is that “hits” is often not the most meaningful metric for a website! You might want to use this experience to choose some more helpful key performance indicators, such as sales or leads.

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: Will Moving to a new Server…

May 8, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: If our IT department wants to change the server that our website resides on, will this affect our search engine rankings?

A: A change in your server (which will be a change in your website’s IP address) or website hosting service does not need to affect your search engine placement. Just be sure of a few things:

Make sure the website doesn’t go “down” for any period. Have all the site files tested and ready on the new server before making the switch.
Do not change any URLs.
Watch out for capitalization issues. Some servers are case-sensitive while others are not. If this is the case with your switch, then you should run a site-wide link check after the switchover to be sure that all links are working (here’s a free online link checker), and spend some time checking for inlinks from other sites and making sure that they are still functioning. If necessary, you may need to set up 301 redirects (your IT department will know what this is) from caps/noncaps URLs to lowercase URLs.
Keep the old site files accessible on the old server for a period of time (some experts recommend a day, some a month) after the switchover. This will allow websites and search engines to update their caches.
Test, test, test! After site launch, run a “site:www.mysite.com” search on Google and click on the links to be sure that everything is behaving just the way you – and your potential customers – expect. (see our Handy Search Shortcuts for other cool ways to search for your site)
Consider possible issues with international SEO targeting. Your server’s geographical location can be a factor; see Will an International Server Location affect My Google Ranks? for more info.

Here are a few other helpful articles on changing servers, hosting service, or domains:

A 2003 article by Taming the Beast offers lots of great general tips on changing servers and addresses some specifics of moving hosts from one country to another.
A very helpful and detailed posting from Google’s well known engineer, Matt Cutt’s, spells out the best practices for moving to a new web host.

We wish your site the best of luck at its new home, and don’t forget to invite us to the housewarming party!

Ask the Experts: What could explain a spike in…

Ask the Experts: Will Moving to a new Server…

Q: If our IT department wants to change the server that our website resides on, will this affect our search engine rankings?

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