70,000 page views in 10 hours causing SERPS crash?

[MonopolyMan]

Had something pretty strange happen two days ago and just looking at the numbers now.

One of my CPA projects was slowly increasing for it's keywords and getting around 700 uniques a day. I installed the Auto Link Juicer plugin and moved a few things around trying to improve the onsite SEO and it fell sharply in the serps within a few hours.

I wasn't happy - but I've seen it happen before when sites are being re-evaluated so I didn't really give it much thought. I built a few links to it and moved on.

I checked Statpress today just to see how it was doing and noticed that the night in between me installing ALJ plugin and the next morning I had a little under 70,000 page views.

It wasn't a spike in traffic, the unique visitors was the same but something crazy was going on there. It's not the plugin constantly doing it because the last couple of days have been normal. Diminished because of the SERPS drop, but normal.

So that's not normal and it's probably not a coincidence that the page views unnaturally spike and the SERPS plunge. I would say it's maybe spiders reacting to the onsite change but Statpress measures spiders separately.

Anyone any ideas? Any help appreciated here.

/edit:

Neither of the other two sites I was testing ALJ on experienced this, but they are on a different theme.

[yukon]

Sounds like someone doing a mass fake referer on your domain.

Was most of the page views on the exact same url/page?

[gulfhosting]

Have you tried any black hat seo

[kiddoman]

It may happen. My web crashed once after 30000page views in about 6 hours. I was confused with that either. While I just got the fact that some famed blogger recommend my web on his own page. Then everything went like this...

[MonopolyMan]

Originally Posted by yukon

Sounds like someone doing a mass fake referer on your domain.

Was most of the page views on the exact same url/page?

I'm fairly sure it was the homepage. None of the individual page views are that far ahead in stat press.

Originally Posted by gulfhosting

Have you tried any black hat seo

There's a 403 from another domain but it was the same niche, a year old and nothing black hat done to it. I don't know if that counts? Plus it had been there for at least a month.

Originally Posted by kiddoman

It may happen. My web crashed once after 30000page views in about 6 hours. I was confused with that either. While I just got the fact that some famed blogger recommend my web on his own page. Then everything went like this...

It's not that, the unique visitors didn't increase.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. This is just strange. It's too much of a coincidence that alj was installed on the same night but strange it hasn't happened again.