Weird views pattern
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Hi,
I’ve noticed a weird pattern in my stats. Every week, usually on a Friday, I’ve been getting one visitor who views multiple pages multiple times. There are no referrers, clicks, likes, or comments. Is this some kind of bot?
They’re viewing most of the same posts week to week.
Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hello there,
Very interesting – I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen bot views behave so consistently, which makes me think this is genuine.
Also, bot traffic tends to be in the high numbers if it happens.
The pages don’t seem to differ, so I’m wondering if this individual is opening up a tab with these articles on, without realising before closing the device itself.
To reassure you, I don’t see anything suspicious about this traffic thus far.
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Thanks. Huh, so essentially, they could have left all the tabs open on their computer and for some reason, they’re only opening that window once a week?
That seems so strange.
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Hi there,
The weak point here is that all site stats are inferred from raw traffic data, so it’s a great way to understand overall trends on your site but can’t really provide specific data on individual visitors.
I have taken a look at your stats however, and given the regularity of the visitor I might actually suggest it could be a bot. Bot traffic is pretty common on the internet and it seems (to me) more likely than a human visitor checking out your site faithfully every Friday.
The good news is that bot traffic is NOT a security risk and you have nothing to worry about there. Public sites get all kinds of visits (human and bots) but all they can do is look and there’s no harm in that. If you are curious to learn more about stats, this is worth having a look at: https://wordpress.com/support/stats
Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.
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It did seem like a bot to me for those reasons. The only question I have is what kind of bot would this be? A Google Analytics bot? Something else? Thanks.
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Given the consistency of the visits, it would have to be something that was specifically programmed to view specific pages.
I’m not convinced it is a bot – pageviews on WordPress.com are only counted if the page is actually loaded in an active browser window, and it would be a very unusual bot that visits a URL in the browser, waits for the page (or at the very least our stats tracking pixel) to finish loading, before moving on to the next. Most bots make use of background processes without ever actually opening the browser.
I can tell you it won’t be Google Analytics. Google Analytics doesn’t work via bots. To use Google Analytics you have to embed tracking code they provide directly on your site, so only you can use that service for your site – someone else can’t set up a bot to monitor your site using Google Analytics.
It’s also not a crawler (the type of bot search engines use to index content on a website) as those don’t use active browser tabs to “view” your site, so their “visits” aren’t ever logged in stats.
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So weird. Any idea why someone would program their computer to open certain web pages every week? Especially a quiet blog like mine? Thanks.
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It’s difficult to say since there is nothing in the site traffic data beyond what you see in your stats. Anything we would say at this point would be pure conjecture.
But again I want to underscore that this is kind of traffic is in no way a risk to your site security. I’m not sure if that was a concern of yours but I wanted to clarify that just to be safe. :)
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I did a bit of googling and the only thing I came across was the fact that there are bots that steal content. Hopefully it’s not that!
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It’s most likely not that, but just in case, we have some recommendations at https://wordpress.com/support/prevent-content-theft/
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