My Wordpress traffic has gone through the roof, huge referrals from wordpress.com - why?

[pugh]

My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined.

This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this.

The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article.

Can anyone offer any insight into this situation?

Thanks

[irvingw]

Is the site monetized? are you seeing any increase in ad revenue or is it just hit and run bot traffic?

Have you checked your back links in WMT to see where the wordpress link is located?

[pugh]

No the site isn't monetized so no increase in ad revenue - it's a wordpress.com install.

The referring link just shows up as wordpress.com, but when I click through I can't see a link to my blog on the wordpress homepage.

Do you think it could be bots or a malicious attack? Surely if it was bots it would at least show up as views of the homepage?

[evolvingSEO]

Can you drill down into something else?  Visitor location perhaps or service provider, to look for any commonality in the spike in traffic?

There is an interesting post here on the SEER blog here about misleading traffic reports.

[evolvingSEO]

Also, are you filtering out your own traffic from your location?

[pugh]

It's the wordpress analytics I'm using so I can't drill down into anything more specific unfortunately.

I can't filter out my own location but traffic has jumped from 3-4k views per day to 18k views, then 72k view and looks like today's views will even eclipse the 72k from yesterday.

[evolvingSEO]

Ahh I see, so you're using Wordpress.com not Wordpress.org?  I am not familiar with the analytics for wordpress.com - so not entirely sure.

So its on wordpress servers though, like mysite.wordpress.com?

[pugh]

Yes that's correct, on wordpress.com rather than wordpress.org and on the wordpress servers.

I'm glad at this stage that it is on wordpress.com instead of self-hosted as the traffic levels probably would have taken it down by now otherwise.

Just seems strange that the referrals are being shown to come from wordpress.com itself.

[KeriMorgret]

Actually, you may be featured on the home page as the fastest growing blog that day or something. I had that once a few years back when Matt Cutts linked to one of my posts on my wordpress.com blog in the comments of his post. Because of the traffic from that post, it hit an algorithm in wordpress.com and the post/domain was linked to from wordpress.com itself.

[pugh]

Thanks Keri.

I did think perhaps it was something to do with that because the views starting coming in immediately after the exclusive content went up. I checked the homepage and couldn't see my blog there anywhere though, even when logged out of wordpress.

The strange thing is that while it shows my total views have had a massive increase, individual views have not gone up, so it's as if the extra views have not actually come to the blog, not even the homepage. If my blog was featured on the wordpress homepage, do you think each impression could be counted as a view? Perhaps that would explain all the extra views without extra traffic.

The influx of views has dropped off again now, the wordpress.com referrals ran for 7 days in total, peaking on the 3rd day and then gradually declining. All in all a nice problem to have provided that it's not a malicious attack!