Loads of Guests even though you haven't advertised much?

[Ashley]

OK, on November 11, I launched a new forum called Music Fun. I don't know where the heck these figures are coming from, but I went on one day and discovered this: The most users online at one time was 34 on 11-16-2013 at 02:37 PM. How is this possible? On opening day I only advertised my site at a couple of places: Here and my host's support forum. Is it really that possible to have figures that high for guests when you're just barely starting out? My figures in guests were never that good when I was on phpBB. Or is this a mark that MyBB is becoming more popular than phpBB. It's awesome and all but I just don't understand it. And this is after a five day period and we don't even have a domain yet. There's gotta be a catch to this, or else there has to be something I'm doing this time around that I haven't done before. I know one major improvement I made is starting at least 3 topics in every forum before advertising, and that's the most I can think of right now. It's almost like my site was indexed in places like Google really super quick. I'm just confused as to why I would have 34 guests now and not when I launched Marie 1988 in January of this year. That was quite the shocker. By the way, if anyone wants to take a peek, the url is http://musicfun.icyboards.net I just don't understand what I'm doing that I got 34 visitors in a matter of five days. I think I had this happen one other time when I ran a MyBB hosted forum as well...but I can't remember for sure. If that was the case it was probably during my first years as a forum owner. What are your thoughts on this? This is really cool, but strange.

OK, fixed the url. Don't know why it said just .net

 

[Shawn Gossman]

A lot of your guests are going to most likely be bots. Forum software cannot identify all the bots out there either so a lot of them will appear as regular guests rather than the bot names. Bots usually find you before you post a link, too.

I haven't submitted my forums to Google for years now and their bot find my new forum pretty much the day I launch them.

 

[Ashley]

A lot of your guests are going to most likely be bots. Forum software cannot identify all the bots out there either so a lot of them will appear as regular guests rather than the bot names. Bots usually find you before you post a link, too.

I haven't submitted my forums to Google for years now and their bot find my new forum pretty much the day I launch them.

OK, so take phpBB for example: When I had Marie 1988 on ProphpBB back in January, I didn't start getting guests until I really started advertising and promoting around. This time around, however, I made a handful of topics in each forum and THEN I started advertising, but before I started even thinking of advertising, I already had 34 guests. I understand that a lot of these could've been unidentified bots, but I don't understand how a search engine can catch on to a brand-spanking new forum when the person has barely started advertising yet? Because like I said, on opening day I only advertised MF here and on my new host's support forum (Icyboards) but what bugged me is getting 34 bots when I didn't have a logo or a domain or any of that. I hope I'm making sense by the way.