First of all, hi everyone, My name is Weslley and I'm new to the forums. To quickly brief my situation. I created a group called Pawprint translations about 2 weeks ago and started translating Tearmoon Empire Story. According to my analytics, I've been receiving 500 to 800 views per chapter, which I consider very good for a not so popular series. Now comes the problem and my question. When looking at traffic's details, most of it comes from Novel Updates. That is expected. But while some come from expected pages, like NU's homepage, the series main page and the reading page, some comes from weird places, like the [REDACTED] address. I know the address is related to Novel Updates, but the extnu part got me concerned. When I learned about the NU bot, I thought it simply consumed RSS feeds, but maybe it is an actual crawler doing HTTP requests? The short version of the question is: Does NU's bot influence the traffic information I'm getting from my analytics? Thanks a lot for the attention.
the extnu stuff is a masker/redirector links to reduce/deter mass link scraping by external bots. read these links. pay attention to Tony's reply especially. https://forum.novelupdates.com/profile-posts/comments/265290/ https://forum.novelupdates.com/posts/321569/ https://forum.novelupdates.com/posts/409954/
Got it. So, it is legit traffic, but the origin is being masked. Fair enough. Thanks for answering so fast.
in the first place, NU bot only reads the rss feed, in other words, whatever data contains in it. and it is not configured to crawl over content pages (chapters) on the trasnlator sites, except for a few sites, which are known to use some kind of password protection (read: adwall) what i think happened was external bots arriving to your site through NU's redirector links and crawling around. so there were bots, just not NU's. internet are infested with bots afterall. and some can be quite aggressive. https://forum.novelupdates.com/online/?type=robot whatever you see on a novel page, basically. covers, description, chapters links, all that stuff. that's how you see when a novel page on NU uses wrong cover, a pirate site will also use that wrong cover. even when it was fixed on NU, sometimes they still continue to use the wrong ones. (example : try googling Apotheosis of a Demon – A Monster Evolution Story and choose any aggregator you found. compare it to NU)
why wouldn't they? pleathora of pages with ready-made infos and links, no need to go find each of translator sites etc. not only did they piggyback NU, they even piggyback each other. look at what happened when mangadex's down. all of the aggregators now has missing updates, slower or outright failed loading, everything.