On March 25 first-time visitors to my website tripled from the average of the previous two months. Weird one-day spikes happen from time to time so I didn’t think much of it. Since then, though, the numbers have stayed high, twice hitting five-times average. The worst day was better than the best day of those earlier two months.
Something must have triggered this, some mention elsewhere on the internet. My problem? I can’t find it.
A Google search brings up nothing. Logically then, the trigger must be on some high-traffic site that Google doesn’t search. Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest. I used the search functions for all three but still nothing, although there is one link on Pinterest with no date.
Any suggestions for going beyond this? Is there a better way to search than just by the name of the site or my name? Are there other sites I should be looking at?
The referral tracker isn’t any help, BTW. The hits are coming off of Google and google.android.googlequicksearchbox.
I get that this is good news, however it’s happening. But it’s frustrating that I can’t do anything to exploit whatever the heck it is.
You could try an explicit link search by googling “link:<Exapno’s URL>” which should show you everywhere that has a link to you (just tested this with a website I’m familiar with, and it found Facebook pages that linked to the site I was searching for).
How much deeper do the analytics go ? Can you see what country and/or browser the hits are coming from ? Many times, the spikes are just bots, often from foreign countries.
a) Interesting. I did not know that. I have a similar interest in seeing such information.
b) I appear to be too stupid to be able to use it. (I’m not utilizing Exapno’s URL of course). Have tried quotation-mark link colon URL goes here quotation-mark and get a no results found. Omitted the quotation marks fore and aft and get lots of hits but most of them irrelevant. Tried link colon left-angle-brace URL goes here right-angle-brace and got “looks like there aren’t many great matches” followed by mostly irrelevant results. Enclosed that whole mess in quotation marks and got a no-results-found once again.
Try this as the search string link:arxiv.org/abs/2006.04822
I get link:arxiv.org/abs/2006.04822 - Google Search which shows a bunch of places that link to this paper about muon experiments (I don’t think this Google feature works as well as it used to, though).
This worked for me. (Oddly, link:www.URL gets only 24 hits, most of them not my site, but link:URL gets 75, with better results.) Found some interesting links I didn’t know about but none of them recent enough.
70+% are from the U.S., 1% from the Russian Federation.
You don’t. What I would suggest is a little feedback widget on the site that says basically “Hi! First visit? Tell me how you found out about this site.”
I follow Brian Harnish on Twitter, I have learned so much from him and his friends. Start with him, if you like his friend’s knowledge follow them too. I rarely Tweet unless I’m #Reclouting. BiITCLOUT
If you’re entering “www.URL”, then what you’re entering isn’t the URL. A URL starts with “http://” or “https://” (or other prefixes, but those wouldn’t be for websites).
…I’m not sure what you’re describing, here. Like, the URL for the SDMB is “https://boards.straightdope.com”. “www.URL” would be “www.https://boards.straightdope.com”, which would be nonsensical. “http://www.http://boards.straightdope.com” would be even more nonsensical. You don’t put http:// or https:// in front of a URL, because those are already part of a URL. Likewise, www is often (though not always) part of a URL.
Dude. I used URL as shorthand, just as several others had already done so in this very thread. Everybody seemed to understand perfectly what that meant except you. And Google understood it just fine. Go argue with them and leave me out of it.
Everyone else in this thread seems to be using “URL” as a shorthand for the uniform resource locator of your site. Which is what it stands for. I have no idea what you’re using it as shorthand for.