I am ad hoc contributor to a not-for-profit website with various
information for developing countries (the target group). 
It was set up in early 2005 in Europe.
The webmaster provides data on the use of the website. 
In February the key numbers were (rounded):
- 20,000 successful hits,
- 19,000 page views,
- 3,000 visits,
- 1,500 unique visitors,
- 1,100 visitors visiting once.

The origin of the visits is also listed (rounded):
USA (1,940)(64%), Uruguay (210), France (70), Australia (60), Japan
(60), UK (50), South Africa (50), Colombia (40), Spain (30),
Switzerland (30),....
Then comes a number of the target group countries with 10 to 20 visits.

Two issues/questions:
111. 
We are surprised by the large number of visits from the US: 64%. 
Could a reason be that some users somehow "route" their use via the US ?  
If that is a likely explanation could you then briefly:
(a) explain how that happens,
(b) give us a best or even wild guess on how large a portion of the US
visits above that might be from other countries, and
(c) indicate which countries that might well be ?  
It might be next to impossible, but your guess is better than mine !
222.  
What could be the reason for Uruguay to come in second with 20% of the
non-US visits ?  The website is partly in Spanish so having many
visitors from Latin America is no surprise for us, but the content is
in no way aimed at Uruguay.  Could it be that there is also here a
"trafic" via another country, e.g. from Brazil which comes very far
down on the list ?

I've got a website I've been working on for about a year. Eventually
it will be a commerce site, but it's not ready yet and no one knows
about it except me. Yet the counter says it gets 20 hits a day.

I believe these are search engine spiders crawling the web, and
showing up as hits.  I don't know if this is applicable to your
situation as you have larger numbers for page views, but perhaps it's
of some interest.

Hi - I'm a professional web developer, so am in a pretty good position
to answer you.

Your suspicion may be partly correct in terms of people being routed
via the US to visit your site - if a visitor uses a "Proxy" server
(for example - Google Web Accelerator), the Google server will have
fetched the page. This is unlikely to register many hits if the site
is static though, as Proxy Servers typically cache the site at their
end, and feed the client the copy they are holding.

You are more likely to find that the US traffic is from both search
engines, and computers run by marketing companies who are trying to
build lists of "active" email addresses. They typically use
"spidering" software similar to the search engines in order to harvest
email addresses - and they will repeatedly come back to your site just
by following links from elsewhere.

At the end of the day you cannot take web server stats as "fact" -
there are too many variables to take into account.

proxy servers and various webservices offering speed increases can
re-route traffic to the US but there are other issues with the ISP's
people use. I am based in the UK however my IP address shows as an
American address. Hits are also search engine bots, scammers and those
who just wandered into your website by mistake.

Most statistic scripts identify the nationality of the visitors by the
top level domain of their hostname. The hostname is a string assigned
to every internet user by their internet service provider and it ends
with a domin name that belongs to the ISP. Many ISPs use domain names
for this purpose that are ending with ".com", ".net", or other top
level domains that are assigned to the usa despite the fact that the
user isn't located there.

AOL for example gives a hostname ending with "aol.com" to all their
users worldwide. For that reason statistic scripts assume that every
aol user worldwide is an American. T-Online, the largest ISP in
Germany, doesn't assign their users a hostname ending with the German
country code ".de" but one ending with "t-dialin.net" causing most
German internet users being counted as "USA" or "others" depending on
how the counter interpretes ".net". And there are many more ISPs
worldwide that follow this practice.

The statistic script of your website is most likely counting all
visitors that do not have a hostname with a country code top level
domain as a visitor from the US.


This would explain the suprisingly high numbers of visits from the US.
But i have no real explanation for the visits from Uruguay. Maybe your
homepage was linked for some reason on some homepage targeted at an
Uruguaian audience.