Web Traffic Mystery

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been observing some strange traffic. I’ve been getting a good number of hits to an old blog article of mine. Close to 1000 hits a day which is a lot for an old article that hasn’t been linked to in months.

The traffic has the following characteristics:

No referrer.

Different IPs.

User agent is the same: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

No other hits from those IPs (at least from the ones I’ve checked at random).

Seeing as how the article is Mac-centric and the user agent is for a Windows client, I suspect that these are automated hits and that whoever is hitting the article doesn’t care about its content. But if it’s some sort of bot attack, I don’t see the point of it.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out much more than that. So, yes, consider this a “Dear Lazyweb” post. If you have any ideas on what’s going on, please post here. Oh, and don’t ask me how, but I have eliminated the Illuminati from the list of suspects. UFOs/aliens are still fair game though.

Update (Oct. 16, 2007): Not sure what happened but it stopped, pretty much completely. It’s like someone flicked a switch. I still have no idea what that was all about but the fact that it stopped pretty suddenly implies there’s a central source to all this.

Also, something else I realized was that it seems as if those hits were hitting the article page but not any of the associated files (css, graphics, etc.). Very strange.

Again, any theories are welcome.