I'm hoping that someone may be able to give me an insight into what appear to be some very strange traffic patterns for a clients website. Specifically with Google organic search referalls.

A bit of background first. The company are specialist IT hardware resellers based in the north of England. The site has around around 8000 pages, most of which are indexed by Google. It is not an ecommerce site, products can't be bought online, it instead acts as an online catalogue and most of the deals are done over the phone.

Google Analytics shows that for most of 2006 the organic search traffic from Google was around 50-80 visits daily, dropping to 10-20 per day at weekends.

On 4th December 2006 the organic Google referalls shot up to 200-450 visits per day but remained unchanged at the weekend. This high volume stayed fairly steady for a full 8 months, not missing a weekday, and then on 26th July 2007 dropped down to 80-100 visits a day and 20-30 per day at the weekend and has stayed roughly the same since. There was no sharp rise or fall in business or enquiries to coincide with the huge rise and then fall in traffic.

The stats for the traffic in the low volume periods is unsurprising, coming from a wide spread of countries, cities and networks. Keywords for these traffic sources were generally a mixture of generic part names, product names, a few for the company itself and most of all a wide spread of part numbers.

In the high volume period it gets a little strange. On any one day, 60-90% of the Google organic search referalls would all be for only one part number or occasionally two.

Stranger still, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the part numbers searched for. Over 8 months, 16 were used. It would generally be for a different part each day, but occasionally for the same part for up to 5 days in a row. The parts varied from low to high value, common or hard to find, and ranged from cpu's, memory, drives, through to panels or cables.

Also, oddly, the top landing page was always the home page and not the corresponding page that an organic search listing would have linked to. There would have been no mention of any of these parts on the home page.

These searches all came from computers on Demon/Thus Plc network, in London, running Windows and IE at 1024x768

Has anyone any idea what may have happened here? We are baffled? Was this some sort of feeble but very prolonged DOS attack?

A denial of service via Google? Seems a rund about way of attacking someone.... so that's unlikely...

I would look at tech news around those dates. Was there a reason for sudden interest? A write up in PC Magazine or something along those lines... Look for reasons that public interest in that particular part may have shot up.

Hard to say really without all the hard data :0(

have you looked at your raw server logs? What do they say?

I've found Google analytics to be a very poor indicator

Unfortunately Northie, the site is on a shared server and our host doesn't have the server logs going that far back.