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.

Darren VanBuren
==============
http://theoks.net/

Sent from my iPod

On Sep 28, 2010, at 8:08, Keith Watkins <kwatkins@redhat.com> wrote:

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@redhat.com

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).  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:
  1. Have you seen an increase in your overall site traffic corresponding to our increase in referrals?
  2. Have you seen a similar increase in exits from your site to our site?
  3. Does your site have any new links to our site that went live on 1 Sep 2010?
  4. Do you know of any reason we would see an increase in referral traffic from your site?
  5. 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. 
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