Tools like Omniture account for and filter out most search engine
crawlers so that is most likely not the issue.
The issue is mainly from a marketing perspective and, despite
arguments to the contrary, websites are primarily marketing
collateral. Changes like these are noticed. The problem is that
going from 200 views/day to 10k+ views/day is not "natural" and
raises flags. The obvious questions need to be asked -- why did
traffic increase radically, is this "bad" traffic (some kind of
attack, phishing, etrc.)), what is causing this traffic, etc. From
a marketing metrics standpoint, a by-product of this traffic is that
the homepage metrics get skewed and the additional click-throughs to
the promotion spots make measuring marketing effectiveness
difficult.
Disclaimer -- these opinions are my own and do not represent
anything other than that.
W. Keith Watkins
Business Analyst
Red Hat, Inc.
On 10/02/2010 10:37 PM, Darren VanBuren wrote:
My *guess* is that a search engine crawler is causing this,
as some pages running on the phx2 boxes have a clickable Red Hat
logo, and crawlers would easily be able to follow that link.
Also, why is this such an issue? I see no reason why it'd be
a problem. I would greatly appreciate if you explained why it's
so concerning.
Referral traffic returned to "normal" levels on 24 Sep
2010. Did you investigate and find anything? Did you do
something to stop the referral traffic? If so, what did you
do? Thank you.
W. Keith Watkins
Omniture Business Analyst
Red Hat, Inc.
919-301-3275
kwatkins@xxxxxxxxxx
On 09/23/2010 02:15 PM, Keith Watkins wrote:
Starting on 1 Sep 2010 there was a significant increase in
the traffic coming from http://fedoraproject.org
to http://www.redhat.com
and the traffic remains elevated (see data below, although
the data is for the domain-level not the page-level).Â
Further, this traffic is producing click-throughs to a few
specific links on the redhat.com homepage. One
last data point, there does not appear to be a pattern to
the IP addresses behind this traffic (The IPs are fairly
evenly distributed across several subnets).
My questions:
- Have you seen an increase in your overall site traffic
corresponding to our increase in referrals?
- Have you seen a similar increase in exits from your
site to our site?
- Does your site have any new links to our site that
went live on 1 Sep 2010?
- Do you know of any reason we would see an increase in
referral traffic from your site?
- Is this legitimate referral traffic or is something
else going on?
Thank you and please contact me with additional questions.
Instances of fedoraproject.org
being a referring domain to the redhat.com domain
| Date |
fedoraproject.org |
| 08/22/10 |
129 |
| 08/23/10 |
188 |
| 08/24/10 |
147 |
| 08/25/10 |
230 |
| 08/26/10 |
200 |
| 08/27/10 |
207 |
| 08/28/10 |
125 |
| 08/29/10 |
141 |
| 08/30/10 |
201 |
| 08/31/10 |
181 |
| 09/01/10 |
7,133 |
| 09/02/10 |
14,303 |
| 09/03/10 |
12,878 |
| 09/04/10 |
11,663 |
| 09/05/10 |
12,894 |
| 09/06/10 |
13,973 |
| 09/07/10 |
13,318 |
| 09/08/10 |
8,755 |
| 09/09/10 |
7,142 |
| 09/10/10 |
8,777 |
| 09/11/10 |
10,927 |
| 09/12/10 |
9,985 |
| 09/13/10 |
10,004 |
| 09/14/10 |
9,283 |
| 09/15/10 |
9,675 |
| 09/16/10 |
11,044 |
| 09/17/10 |
9,097 |
| 09/18/10 |
8,889 |
| 09/19/10 |
10,862 |
| 09/20/10 |
9,017 |
| 09/21/10 |
8,116 |
| 09/22/10 |
7,422 |
--
W. Keith Watkins
Business Analyst
Red Hat, Inc.Â
|
