Strange hits about 4000 of them.

Being a bit sceptical of all things web site based and appeasing the almighty god of Google

The last 24hrs have been a strange barrage of hits. I normally average between 800 to 1000 a day.

The last 24hrs I have been taking 5000+

I use woopra for real time stats monitoring.

4200 of them have just been straight hits to the forum home, average time on site 8 seconds. No other pages viewed.

Not all the ip´s are the same, there were over 1k from Korea and the rest from loads of other countries.

So its not one person trying to ping my forum and drop the server, but they do mainly happen over night, which again would point it to the previous idea of another person leaving their pc on overnight doing it.

Any ideas whats going on?

Is it some kind of black hat method in dropping a website from Google?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

I have experienced the same thing, analytics is showing 3 times the normal direct hits.

april fool ??

HA! I was going to make the same thread!

The same thing has been happening to my forum since I installed the livestats from here. Also google has been updating my pages a lot quicker...very weird.

Lets hope its some April fools virus that only affected spammers computers, leaving their computers clocking up useless hits rather than pointless spam posts and the inability to use their computers.

We live in hope

I have seen the same pattern, but I am not sure why.

We have exprienced similar hits last week. Our online users average skyrocketted to 3k online guests with 15minute cookie timeout. All the hits were coming within Far eastern countiries. After one week , it slowed down.

I experienced a similar increase in traffic about 10 days ago.
The traffic was up 4 times of normal, for 2 continuous days.

A lot of it was 'direct traffic'. Organic visits and site referrals remained more or less the same.
No idea what was the cause of this strange rise.

Im still monitoring it in case its some kind of content grabber.

But people on another forum pay good money for similar hits I asked about the service on here once.

Looking at my stats, it seems to occur between midnight and 10am. I'm gmt + 1 here.

The first night it was almost one single line, hits and page views the same amount, last night page views increased over the period.

As long as I know you wont get penalised by google for any strange behaviour, it one less thing to worry about.