2.5K visits in under 2 hours (4.Viewing)

This morning I had over 2,500 visits for a single domain within less than 2 hours.

What's most strange is that I let the domain expire last year and it's currently available for registration... Moreover, I deleted the listing at Dan a long time ago too and it's not listed by anyone else... so how is it possible that my analytics shows all these visits to this domain I don't own or have listed anymore? Anybody know what's going or why this might be happening?

The domain in question is a French geo domain... which isn't that great and it never received much traffic at all when I did in fact own it.

robots/crawlers?

Have you checked Archive.org and Ahrefs backlinks checker https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker ?

Where's the traffic coming from?

I had high traffic from Boardman, Oregon (They were all bots)

Thanks guy. I dug a bit deeper and it looks like the traffic came from gammatraffic.com where you can supposedly get free/paid traffic. They are apparently based in Canada, or they at least have a Canadian flag showing at the bottom of their homepage.

I doubt someone cares that much about the domain considering it’s still available so I’m guessing this website just picks random domains occasionally, maybe to get attention.

Still not sure how they connect this domain to my Dan account given the listing has been deleted for a long time but it obviously has something to do with me previously having it listed there.