What's up with strange Yahoo traffic?

1. 96

   wildernessposted 10 years ago

   Although I doubt this is an HP bug, I'll post it in the tech problems anyway -
   
   Yesterday traffic jumped about 20%.  Almost all from one hub:
   
   HP stats says that hub got 350 views, up 300 from normal, with 275 of it from Yahoo.  That's a weeks worth of traffic from Yahoo for the entire account.
   Adsense says traffic is up a touch, nothing really unusual.
   Analytics says traffic is up a touch, with that hub up only a little and just 6 views from Yahoo.
   
   Now, I've had machine views before, but never from a search engine.  That's a huge variance between reports.  What could be up with this?  Anyone?

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      Matthew Meyerposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      @wilderness We are unaware of anything out of the ordinary related to Yahoo traffic.  It is possible that it is a bot that Yahoo is using to crawl content.

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      1. 96

         wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks, Matthew.  I didn't expect that HP had a glitch but posted it here just in case you flew by and would see the post.  That those 275 visits don't show up on the earnings impressions is odd, though - I had expected to see at least some increase from the day before but it went down instead.
         
         I doubt it is a bot; 275 visits to one hub and none to others doesn't make any sense at all.  Or maybe they're looking for the best article out of the trillions on the web and keep coming back to check it against other candidates.  
         
         And, just possibly, Wilderness is suffering from delusions of grandeur.

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2. 73

   Barbara Kayposted 10 years ago

   My Yahoo traffic isn't up. Maybe you just had a good day.

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   1. 96

      wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      Actually, it was a good two hours or so.  The day was fair to good, but all those Yahoo visits happened over about a 2 hour time span.  Very odd - I wondered if a classroom (it's an informational hub designed for specific students) have given an assignment, but 275 students?  And why didn't analytics record them?

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         paradigmsearchposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Analytics is not always real-time. A day is an admittedly long time, but there is still a shot that the Analytics data might show up. I hope it does.

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            wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            Not only is a day a long time, but now HP earnings have updated with a drop in impressions from the day before instead of a large increase.
            
            Oh well - I didn't believe it anyway.  It would be interesting to understand what happened, though.

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3. 59

   Fiction Tellerposted 10 years ago

   That has the earmark of a featured link on one of Yahoo's pages.  Was it yahoo search traffic or referral? Did you check your referral traffic in Analytics to see if Yahoo sent you anything?

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   1. 96

      wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      I don't remember seeing anything about referrals in Analytics.  In any case, analyitics only showed 68 visits while HP showed 350.  Analytics simply did not pick them up at all.

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   LeanManposted 10 years ago

   This seems to be a fairly common occurrence, there have been forum posts in the past about bots from yahoo and facebook that visit and leave 200+ visits registered on the HP stats but show nothing at all on the Google analytics.
   I see them quite regularly when I check my stats, usually every week or two a hub will get a sudden inexplicable boost in the hundreds, typically a better performing hub not one of those just getting a handful of visitors.

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   1. 96

      wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      I think you're probably right - a bot of some kind. 
      
      Wish it would show up on our ad impressions, though - can't they design a bot that would buy something now and then?  Maybe a new battery from Amazon?

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