What caused a spike in site traffic?

[Ghost]

I remember posting on Reddit a lot when I had an art website (www.arrt.es - I sold it and now it's defunct) and receiving large amounts of traffic (20,000-80,000 unique visits) whenever one of my posts got popular. However, I have also gotten lots of visits from YouTube descriptions although not that many.

What single source or promotion effort led to the largest spike on any of your current or past websites?

 

[Jason76]

No doubt it is from Facebook groups and pages. However, in 2011, when SEO was much easier - I was able to get a lot from search engines, first Google and Bing, and later only Bing.

 

[Page]

All content goes to social media when there is new content on the site. And so I get bots. I mean most of the traffic will be most of the bots and not real traffic. Unless you post things on your own and tweet to real people then you will get real traffic. I have an system that my RSS feed gets sent out to social media

 

[overcast]

Sometimes scrapers from china and russia who steal content can also bring a lot of traffic. First those scrapers give link and then they steal the content. I have seen that with one blog.

 

[Ghost]

Sometimes scrapers from china and russia who steal content can also bring a lot of traffic. First those scrapers give link and then they steal the content. I have seen that with one blog.

It's not always China and Russia.
One time I built a web crawler (well, a few of them) for a client and we scraped business information from millions of pages. It's legal to crawl if you follow certain rules and don't steal content to display on your own site, and a lot of crawlers these days are doing it legally for business data, trend analyzing, and more.