First; I would recommend SquareSpace [2] to anyone who wants to run a website with lots of features and easy as 1-2-3. It's extremely easy to use, and no HTML knowledge is required to start modifying the layout etc. (it helps if you do though).
With the website comes a management center (Dashboard) where you can view traffic/visitor statistics (among a dozen of other things regarding the website). Every now and then, I see the traffic increase.
Green = Visiting IP's / Grey = Pageviews
Initially I thought;
Damn, they started the DDoS again....
After that;
They Slashdotted me (one can always hope)
Investigation of the Detailed Activity page shows that there a IP addresses that access dozens of (random) pages on the website within a couple of seconds. No ordinary user could click/surf this fast. Also, the user agent is in most cases IE6. All signs that this is the work of (search engine) crawlers / (spam)robots.
I noticed this weeks ago, and after that I got a bit suspicious on the validity of the statistics, so I started using Google Analytics as a shadow system in determining if it's a SquareSpace issue or not.
It turned out that the (unique) visitors are (almost) the same, but the pageviews are completely different.
Blue = Visits / Orange = PageViewsNote that the the scale of the orange line (pageviews) has a different scale (on average; 1 visit = 1.42 pageviews), but even that it has a different scale the trend is easy to spot. Compare that to the SquareSpace statistics.....
I hope that they redesign the traffic statistics on the SquareSpace backend, since it paints a skewed picture on actual traffic on your (SquareSpace) website.