Hi, I have a maybe little strange question, but it has something to do with photos, technology and the internet: so I have created a real website with my real name, a real domain and a Piwigo gallery a few months ago (it is not the blog that is linked to my profile page here). Piwigo has a built in hitcounter and according to that I get massive views. But there is no hitcounter on the starting page. The views start to explode about one week after I uploaded a photo. Where do they all come from? I mean the photos are not even tagged properly. Since one or two weeks the website is linked to my Instagram profile and vice versa, but it cannot be that because according to the Instagram statistics an average photo there only gets about 100 views on the first day, and the most viewed photos have a couple of hundred views. But a photo that I uploaded to my website about 10 days ago already got more than 1000 views and the most viewed photo has more than 5000 views. Maybe this is normal, but for me it is strange. The blog that is linked to to my pixls.us profile only gets about 5-10 visitors per week, even though it exists since many years and is well searchable through google etc.
I have published some articles in a popular computer journal - could it be only that? I am also publishing regularly in a scientific (online and freely accessible) journal/website and my doctoral thesis is online since some years, but only a fraction of my publications are mentioned on my website and I think my research area is not extremely popular. I think my thesis has about 400 downloads per year. Maybe also worth to mention that my landscape photos get more views than other shots. Are all those visitors bots? But there is a clear tendency that the better photos get more views. Well and so far my website does not seem to lead many visitors to my Instagram profile. My real name seems to be a very “popular” one in the sense that there are many more people who have the same name, but in the metropole where I live I seem to be nr. 1 with this name on Google, and I am also the nr. 1 or 2 photographer with this name. According to the statistics of my webhoster most of my visitors come from Germany, even though the website is in English and I don’t live in Germany - that might point to the computer journal? Actually all my publications are in German.
Thanks in advance for the feedback.
Anna
Some hosting sites keep statistics on the client IP addresss and source URLs. This can tell you what proportion are robots, divided into search engines and hackers, and what search terms were used, or what pages link to yours.
The data would probably answer some of your questions. You might even find that some websites have a “< img src= …” link to your photos.
Interesting, I have my piwigo site online for about a year now, hosted on piwigo.com for convenience reasons, and I don’t see any traffic other than people I personally shared the page with… meaning I don’t have any inbound links, therefore the page is almost invisible to bots
I would guess this really has something to do with your journal publications. I can confirm that your website is the very first hit on google (not on duckduck go). It even shows up as first hit if I use a VPN and in incognito mode (searching full name plus city)… That’s quite some SEO achievement.
Did you verify your ownership of the site in the google webmaster tools? Google pushes personal pages if they can be referenced with real publications somewhere
You should add some analytics to your site, then you’d know.
If you think the traffic is too much, it is probably traffic from bots.
My guess would also be crawlers. (Search engines constantly scouring the internet for links and content). They can, in some cases, make up a large amount of “hits” you might see. For instance, here’s our stats from the last month:
You can see a non-trivial amount of crawlers indexing content here (~5K pageviews per day).
Try installing analytics to get a better view of your traffic and user patterns?
No, I did not do any such thing.
Meanwhile I had a closer look at the statistics of my webhoster. According to that, I had more than 2000 visitors since the website is online which is 7 months or so. So if that is true, many visitors must have indeed clicked on the same photos several times. One can subtract from this number roughly 200 visits from Austria, because that’s me checking the website from another browser while working on it. From Germany I have almost 400 visitors. And quite a few also from France and the US. The pages that have the most hits are in fact the photo pages, then comes the starting page with around 900 hits. And one more thing that is worth to mention: around 80% of my visitors spend less than a minute on my website. So that might point to “< img src= …” links or bots? Well, and 90% of the visitors are desktop users, using a Chromium based browser - that is surprising, isn’t it? But I have no info about referring sites.
So far I have a plain html starting page + Piwigo for the gallery. I am still thinking about and trying out other CMS solutions where I could add more sophisticated analytics tools. But I want something that looks and is really simple.
I use the https://goaccess.io/ log analyzer to avoid exposing my users to unnecessary privacy issues. I’m not running a business or trying hard to push traffic and for those purposes goaccess is pretty good and allows for filtering out known bots.
I run my own server though so perhaps goaccess isn’t possible on most hosting solutions. Since I don’t run a business I can afford to ignore my stats even if curiosity and the possibility of more analytics can be enticing. I tell myself I have no use for detailed info. I can see that google and Pinterest drives a fair bit of traffic for me.
I don’t have any analytics at all on Filmulator’s site, only getting an indirect idea of traffic through GitHub.
I know I’d obsess about it way too much if I had detailed data on things like download count.
For GIMP we don’t track users or downloads at all. Which is great for privacy and maddening for understanding our needs sometimes (we have either had 100 or 100,000 downloads last month… 
).