Advice please - Huge Traffic Spike!

[patch1308]

Hi fellow warriors,

I have a few adsense sites and have been steadily growing them this year and have started to see some results.

However today one of my sites has received a huge traffic surge, visitors have gone from 30-40 per day to over 1500 in a few hours.
My site is at #3 and has been for a while so there's no change in the rankings for either the long tail kw or derivatives.

The traffic source is coming from the US and I've contacted Hostgator who informed me that my account and website is safe and that the traffic has come from multiple IPs.
My CTR is between 7-10% so nothing abnormal there.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this or does anyone have any idea why this has happened?
Should I remove adsense from my site until I can understand where this burst of traffic is coming from?

Any advice greatly appreciated

Cheers, Paul

[xvisionxx]

Well,if the traffic is ok,why do you want to remove it?
And its blackfriday,almost any site that ranks up well at google got huge traffics,understand?

[zeplin169]

Check your analytics and see if its serp traffic, if it is then so what you get more money. If its coming from else where then you need to look into it

[patch1308]

Originally Posted by xvisionxx

Well,if the traffic is ok,why do you want to remove it?
And its blackfriday,almost any site that ranks up well at google got huge traffics,understand?

Hi, thanks for that, I understand Black Friday and saw the shopping madness on the news. However this traffic spike is only limited one of my sites, it's not a shopping or review site the content is more informational so I don't understand why all of a sudden the surge?
Now up to 1600 page views in 6 hours from 30 - 40/day previously, something doesn't ring true somewhere.......

[patch1308]

Originally Posted by zeplin169

Check your analytics and see if its serp traffic, if it is then so what you get more money. If its coming from else where then you need to look into it

Hi, I haven't got google analytics but I've had a look at stat press in WP and all the last known referrers have been from the same site. The site is called pinterest dot com - an online pinboard, if that's got something to do with it?

[webdevpro]

One reason could be someone else had referred your site on high traffic site and the traffic came form the same site etc. etc.

[andynathan]

I would reccomend getting Google analytical as well, because that way Google will know if your site is levity. Also, if something is hincky it gives the impression that you are open with them. I just had a similar jump on a site. When I checked Google analytics it turned out that an article went big on stumbleupon. I adjusted one or two things on my site to take advantage and then moved forward.

[Goatboy]

I had it happen once. One of my sites is an authority site and for several days last year I noticed a surge in traffic that was 10 or 20 times what I normally receive. Turns out someone participating in a very large forum was having an argument and linked to my site to support their position. Despite the massive blast of traffic, I received only the normal number of clicks, because none of the additional visitors were buyers. All the forum referred traffic was interested in was reading the authority article and then going back to their forum to continue the argument.

[londonwarrior]

I've had this happen to me. Someone on a forum mentioned my site and the traffic spiked by 1000-2000 for a day, then slowly went back to normal. You should try to get it mentioned more often on the site it was on. Could be a good source of traffic.

[patch1308]

Thank-you for your constructive comments, the day ended on nearly 4,000 page views for my key phrase that only gets 4,400 exact local searches per month!

The clicks were relative to the views so consequently there is a spike in my earnings yesterday. I'll monitor it closely today and probably put google analytics on the site to see if that can shed any further light.

As I said above when I check the stats on WP all the previous referrers are coming from Pinterest dot com, could something viral be emanating from there??

More traffic is obviously welcome but I want only natural traffic and not from possibly a paid source that someone may have directed at my site. Maybe that someone was after more traffic for their site and submitted the wrong URL with my domain extension instead of their own (I think we've all got our extensions wrong at sometime)

[GeorgR.]

Well, without Analytics or statcounter you can only guess. But a site of mine was flooded by a sp@mbot the recent days, maybe they are more active recently. There is a LOT of such bots going around recently. I started blocking those on my server within the firewall settings. They have anti-sp@m lists included and block those IPs.

[Joseph Then]

It also happens to me, twice. When I checked my Google Analytics, I realized that for the first time, it's all Stumble Upon traffic.

For the 2nd time, it's all direct traffic.

[honyflights]

Traffic gaining can be a big aim for any industry so just need to be updated with best sources for your site. I think if one use stumble, facebook, twitter and build some effective community he will have good amount of traffic. But generally we find that traffic from social networking sites have low conversion rate so need to updated with an best links that will increase traffic from search engine.

[patch1308]

I've got analtyical on board now and done some digging and as andynathan experienced with stumbleupon it seems my site has gone viral on Pinterest. I'd took my code off to protect my adsense account but after a further conversation with Hostgator decided to put the code back on and enjoy the traffic.

[jdownloads]

This kind of along the same lines but I have a few domains that weren't doing much for me so I decided to try adsense for domains. One domain in particular will hit maybe 25 page views on average every day with about 1 or 2 clicks, yesterday it hit 11,024 page views with 35 clicks.

Checking in today it looks back on track for 25 page views.

I have no idea what happened, it wasn't my doing. Any ideas?

[jdownloads]

Once again, my traffic has spiked for the same domain. It happens every Monday, is there any way I can figure out where this surge is coming from? Its driving me crazy.