What happened to google?

My website has suddenly gotten a huge wave of hits from Google and Google.es. What happened?

• Google Analytics is not being particularly helpful. When I click on the "see the referring link" it gives me a blank Google search page. Duh. WHY is my site suddenly appearing in so many Google searches in Spain (and Portugal) when we're a small, independent retail store and spa in NYC? We've gone from 200 hits a day to over 17,000 today and its only 12noon here!

• Answer:

  One time I was running a PPC Adwords campaign, and we noticed a surge in clicks from one particular site that had nothing to do with us.  Seems an unscrupulous web author was gaming the Adsense system so that our ad was clicked on by people looking for free games.  That's probably not your problem. Here's some other things for you to look at. Google has a number of useful dimensions relating to how traffic arrives at your site.    A summary of them are:  visitorType, referralPath, campaign, source, medium, keyword.  IMO the best one for you to check would be referralPath since it will tell you  specific pages that're driving them.  Together with networkLocation and networkDomain, you might be able to figure who/what/why. These dimensions and combinations are easy to get. I don't know how to do it with Google Analytics but our company has a product you can download for a free trial that makes it very easy to things like I just said. Good luck with finding out the cause and let's hope it's just some A-list blogger who said wonderful things about your site.