WTF? Pageview Bloat?

I installed the new theme last week.  Last Thursday in fact.  Just 4 days ago.  If you’ll look at my popular posts on the homepage, you’ll notice that the most popular post is one I wrote way back in September of 2006 called Intel, UC Santa Barbara Develop Laser Processor.  You’d think it was a great post or something, not the regurgitation of news that it really is.  So, why is it at the top of my popular posts list?  According to the popularity contest plugin, it’s gotten over 11,000 pageviews since last Thursday.  Impressive, no?

Not really.  You see, according to both Statcounter and Google Analytics, this site has only had about 15,000 pageviews as a whole for the entire month of January.  According to Analytics, that post has only received 12 pageviews in the last 30 days.  That post is suffering from some major pageview bloat.  And I can’t figure out why.  It’s done that for as long as I can remember and it just won’t stop.  I’ve checked everything that I can think of and still cannot figure it out.  I’ve looked for a scraper that would be opening it up in a frame, but when I search for unique text from the post, the only result is my site.

So, I’m gonna ask you.  Have you ever had an issue like this?  Any ideas on fixing it?