Looks Fishy to Me: 1,286 Page Views on the 5/9/2011

The final page views count for the 5th of September was 1,286. I posted about this previously (here) but at that stage the view count was only up to 684. Then, as you can see from the stats table shown, on the 6th it fell down to 623 and then got back to what I would consider normal on the 7th.

So the question remains, what the Sam Hill was going on to spike the page views on my site at almost 1,300 on the 5th?

The number of unique visitors is pretty normal although it does get up into the mid 70s the next day—which is sort of high for my site.

It has been suggested by people I work with that someone was scraping content. Scraping content is where someone goes to each posting and copies the content off so they can use it themselves. But this sort of does not add up either. There are about 460 postings on my site. If someone was scraping content then you would expect the count to go up by about 460; so it would be somewhere around 600-ish (being the 140 normal page views per day plus the 460 created by the person scraping content). But the increased views are in the range of 1,600 considering the sum of the increases on the 5th and the 6th.

So maybe more than one person was scraping content. But seriously, what are the odds of three or more people deciding to scrape content from my site on the same two days? I have no idea how to work that out but the odds of that have to be astronomical.

Also, site scrapers usually scrape content from much more interesting sites or pictures from booby sites—and my site doesn’t fit either of these profiles. What is someone going to do with content scraped from my site? It has no commercial value and no personal use value (as is the case with booby sites).

Hence, I don’t think the nine times increase in posting views on the 5th were a result of site scraping. But this leaves me with the question: Why did the views count spike yet the unique visitor count stayed normal?

Hmmmmm (Yes, I know that it is generally accepted that ‘Hmmm’ is spelt with three “m”s, but I wanted a really long Hmmm).