Why am I seeing periodic massive unexplained spikes in page views?

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Bob Holdeman
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One of the sites we host has had a huge spike in page views in March and another in August that we cannot explain. The actual number of visitors even went down slightly from the previous month.

I see in other support posts that this may result from failed requests, but an extra 30,000 failed requests seems too much, since there have not been any changes to the site (i.e.: deleted or renamed pages).

The Page report shows the extra page views are coming mostly on the homepage (default.aspx). The daily page access graphs do not show the spikes, either.

I am only seeing 3,600 errors in August, with 32,000 page views. In July there were 5,700 errors with only 6,800 page views reported.

Can anyone help explain why the spike in page views?
spike in page views
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Michael
It is difficult to say something specific without analyzing the log files, but what you should do is to check which pages got a lot of traffic during these peaks. After it you can analyze requests for these pages only (using filters) and check the requests statistics including the Hosts report. E.g. maybe there was some undetected robot (e.g. uptime checker) that downloaded the same page numerous times.