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dataviz1000today at 1:56 PM1 replyview on HN

The tin hat guess. Did you include Google analytics embedded in the pages? Do you navigate to pages and Google analytics sends that data home? 10 years ago I discovered that Google analytics would send the equivalent amount as organic users; meaning if we sent an email newsletter with links to articles, Google would send almost 1:1 ratio the same number of people from search results. They are tracking everything and using it for more than just reporting.

Do you use a CMS or other tools that auto generate sitemap.xml? Perhaps you unknowingly told Google about those sub-pages.


Replies

edoceotoday at 3:15 PM

No GA, no external assets, no Google fonts. I really thought I was being careful.