Stats is off the hook

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-23-2006, 03:05 AM

I couldn't find a more appropriate forum for this post, sorry.

I have a bit of a concern. I check my stats every day on one of my sites, and this month, I have been typically getting around 160-170 unique visitors per day, and making an average of $3.00 per day on adsense. This morning, I checked on my stats, and they seem to have gone off, showing nearly 1000 unique visitors, only trouble is, my adsense went down yesterday to below $2.00. So the conclusion that I came to is that these stats aren't correct, but I can't figure out why they would be off.

Here are some screen shots:

I don't have any DB's that I need to worry about, and no forms to fill out on the site, but it just seems to me that someone is either trying to hack my site, or somehow one of those visitor boosting programs got ahold of my site some how.

Does anyone have any ideas as to whats going on?

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-23-2006, 03:35 AM

Also, looking at my "latest 300" stats, most of them are entering in the same page, which is a 3rd level page, not the home page. Most of the uniques don't have a referring site, meaning that it is showing up like a direct address, and all are unique IP's. I am getting new visits now about on average of once per 2 minutes, or 30 per hour. Is there anyway I can tell where they are coming from?

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-24-2006, 08:30 AM

Okay, so today it got even worse. I am showing 1500 unique visitors yesterday, but my adsense isn't going anywhere, and this is ruining my ability to check my stats. I don't know how many useful unique visitors I'm getting. They aren't coming from any search engine, from any links, when I look at the raw access logs, they are all unique IP's, but with no referrer address. I checked with Google analytics, but it's not showing any of these visitors at all. I am seriously worried that someone got pissed at me about something, and this is how they are retaliating. Although I could think of a hundred better ways to retaliate, it sucks because I won't be able to accurately assess my statistics for the entire month of December because of this.

I put up an offer at my site offering $1.00 through paypal on the page that's getting the most hits, it's a mailto form, but I haven't gotten a single response, out of 1200 hits on that page, you'd think someone would.

Please, if you know something about what could be happening, let me know.

Ferre · 12-24-2006, 09:03 AM

Me thinks some bot is hitting your mailto form. If I was you I'd check if it's secure.

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-24-2006, 09:12 AM

I just added it yesterday to try to find out where some of the visitors were coming from. Do you suppose a bot could have gotten ahold of it already? I think I will remove it just in case anyhow, it's not done me a bit of good.

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-24-2006, 10:53 AM

I think it's a bot too, but what for? I just was checking my log files, and noticed that I don't get hits on my style.css file or any of the images for the pages being hit. Did that make sense? Typical visits to any single page will show hits from that IP to the style.css, all the images on that page, and the .ico file, whereas these "special" hits aren't calling these files, only the php file.

I checked google analytics, and nothing. Google adsense is showing fewer than normal page impressions, and I get nothing from my awstats except the unique IP's.

These questionable hits are from approximately 2000 unique IP's from all around the world, over the past 2 days, so what could be happening?

**ToddW** · 12-25-2006, 10:28 PM

Me thinks someone hotlinked something on your site

andt hat's why analytics is not showing it but awstats is. Also why no refer, and why you are not earning more money, and why almost all are unique IPs.

Ferre · 12-26-2006, 01:53 AM

If it is hotlinking you should be able to see the referrer URL in your last visitors page in awstats. Did you check that?

jumpenjuhosaphat · 12-26-2006, 04:31 AM

Yeah, I thought of that too. In awstats hotlinkers show up as hits but not page views, and the number is lower than 200. Most of which are from a single page on someone's MySpace profile. These visits are showing up in awstats as direct address or bookmarks visits.
I did some messing around with some of the IP addresses, looking them up, checking if they are blacklisted anywhere. Nothing unusual, IP's were all normal, from all over the globe.