I wasn’t sure where to put this. I have a web site that contains (among other things) several authorized downloadable songs. Every now and then I check my web site’s stats page so I can know who’s accessing the page and where they came from, just out of curiousity. The stats page gives me all sorts of information, among which is how many times a particular site has accessed. I can only tell that my site was hit by a certain place, not where they went and what they did once they got there. That is, I can see also what was downloaded and how many times, but not who came from where and downloaded what. Since this web site is linked at several different places and several gbs are downloaded every month, those stats don’t help me know the source of who downloaded what.
I just checked the stats for November so far, and imagine my surprise when I found that the site had been accessed 625 times from this web site: http://music.soso.com/. Looks to be a Japanese music site. Why my site would be linked on a Japanese music site is a mystery to me. The downloadable songs I make available are by Happy Rhodes, who has no fans in Japan, and no presence there, so I’m at a loss to explain what’s going on. There’s nothing in the what’s-being-downloaded stats to indicate that I’ve been hacked and people are downloading things I didn’t make available myself.
I’m wondering if someone who reads Japanese could look and see if they see the name “Happy Rhodes” on that page. If she suddenly got some fans in Japan, it would be news to me, and big news at that. It’s so highly unlikely.
I did a “View Source Code” and searched for “wretchawry” (my site is wretchawry.com) and it didn’t find anything. So my second question is, how the heck can my site be getting hits without the url appearing in the source code??
Get yourself a free Google Analytics account and get to setting up real stats for your site. You’ll have more info than you ever wanted to know about what’s being accessed on your site.
As for Japanese, can’t help ya there but you can put this into a Google search: link:wretchawry.com/happy/samples/index.html And see who is linking to that page. Unfortunately, those results don’t bring up soso.com…
Oh, and, you can use the Google “translate this page” to translate a page. Works pretty well:
Worth noting that that site is in Chinese, not Japanese. Unfortunately my command of written Japanese is very shaky at best, and I can’t read Chinese at all, so can’t help you much there.
As for the question not being able to find a link to your page in the source code, the content on that page probably changes very quickly, so it seems likely that the link to your site would no longer be there even if you were seeing traffic from it just yesterday.
Thanks for the tip about Google Analytics ZipperJJ. I’m checking it out.
slaps forehead! Chinese!! I hope I haven’t offended any Chinese (or Japanese) by getting the two mixed up. I just couldn’t tell. Chinese, YES, now it all makes sense. She DOES have a following in China. Tiny, but there. One of her fans, a Canadian fella, used to teach English in China, and he would use her songs and lyrics as teaching tools. They would listen to songs while looking at a lyric sheet. Later, when I started putting up subtitled videos on Google Video, they would watch/listen/read them. I haven’t heard from this guy for a long time and didn’t think he was still in China. Either he’s still there and spreading the word or the fans he made (and just about everyone he taught became a fan) are driving this. Interesting!
Honestly tho, I don’t see why you are so surprised that there are Chinese people outside of the states who have found a particular artist and like her, even if she is obscure. It happens; there are a lot of people with internet connections there. I wouldn’t even necessarily pin it on that one Canadian dude you mentioned.