Hey everyone, I'm new here.

I was looking for a forum like this because I'm trying to figure out how popular my website is, and I'm a little confused.  My server logs show a constant drip of traffic (average 3 or 4 unique visits per day) but they're from all over the world.  Google Analytics shows the same thing.

I'm not doing much of anything to promote the site at all - I haven't even listed keywords for the search engines.  I do want traffic, I'm just relying entirely on word-of-mouth to get it.  The question I have is: Is it possible that I'm actually getting thousands of visitors?

I'm aware of caching, and my site would be a good candidate for that.  It's a very simple site with just text and a few pictures - no dynamic content.  And it would seem that my site is getting cached at proxy servers - unless it happens that just one person from South Africa has told just one person in Iran, who told just one person in Czechia, etc. (about 60 different coutries total in the past three months)

But then if there are thousands of visitors, why doesn't Google Analytics show more hits?  GA is a script-based service that works through cookies right?  it should show at least an order of magnitude more traffic right? (like 20 or 30 visitors per day)

Or am I just wrong about how all this works?

TIA,
Killa

So, if my traffic is all "type-in" traffic, that makes it less likely to appear?  3/4 of my traffic is "no referrer."

And something else that's weird.  The other 1/4 of the traffic comes from searches on google images.  So I went there myself and started running searches, and I can pretty easily find my site's images in the top 30 results - out of millions - with pretty generic search phrases.  But when I go to google's regular search engine: nothing.  (Except when I search for a product I mention by name on the site, my site is the third result, ahead of the vendor's site even.)

I saw a notice at the bottom of the results page saying my results had been customized by google, so I signed out of google and I tried to turn that off to make sure that it wasn't influencing the results and they remain as described above.

I'm pretty sure that no one is linking to my site.  At least, that's what Yahoo (my host) says.  And I thought I was sure that that was one of the primary ways google ranked sites, so it makes sense that my site doesn't come up in searches . . . but then why would my images be so highly ranked?

Hey,
Thanks for the replies.

I'm in a pretty well-populated niche, and the images don't have any information attached to them besides their filenames, so I think it's just a whole lot more likely that I'm taking the world by storm.

Originally, I was pretty sure that my site had found the right people, but it was taking so long for it to show up on the news that I was beginning to question if I had actually succeeded.  But I guess bitches are still trying to make a dime off this before it goes public.  (And perhaps trying to delay the event.)

Feb. 14:  Concept patented, website online.
Mar. 1:  Unusual traffic pattern begins.
Mar. 9:  Worldwide stock rally commences.