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Monday, August 1, 2016

Fellow Bloggers - Go Check Your Stats

Last week, McThag was saying he noticed a surge in visits to his blog from Russia.  Yesterday, Sense of Events posted the same thing.

Between reading those two, curiosity got the better of me and I checked my stats.  Same thing.  These are my stats for the last week. 
For the previous month, the US and Russia swap.
US         27592
Russia  13655
(Sidenote: Mauritius?  Really?) 

Since it's for four weeks, take off the 9623 visits last week and it says that in the 3 prior weeks there were ~4100 visits, or 1370-ish a week.  Last week had 7 times more visits from Russia than that average.

We swapped emails and Donald Sensing says he has other blogs, and they show the same pattern.  I run a specialty page on blogger that has very low readership - 8 or 10 a day.  I looked there and it had 90 visits from Russia last week.

I wonder what they're searching for?  While McThag, Sense of Events and I may have some things in common, throw in the other blogs and the similarity goes away.  It looks like they're visiting everybody. 

So go check your stats page. Are the Russians really checking all of us?  I've got to assume it's automated (bots), but it's still a terrible waste of resources to look at everyone on blogspot.com.


15 comments:

  1. The internet is not simply "unsafe" it is a smorgasbord for hackers. It is not accidental. When the hi-tech industry that creates the language and the protocals they get input from the commercial/business community (i.e. those who make money or gain power using the internet). These groups and individuals wanted tricks and backdoors in the system, NOT to commit crimes but to make sure that users had to accept their cookies, see their ads and that they could collect information about them. The hackers have simply used these tricks and backdoors to access things which should never be on the internet.
    When I hear that some government agency has been hacked and secrets stolen I truly believe someone in those agencies needs to go to jail. The internet should never be connected to systems with secrets on them. Ditto for corporations whose proprietary data gets stolen. Yes the internet is incredibly useful but do not put anything there you do not want printed in the newspaper.

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    1. To be clear, we're not talking about attempts to hack our accounts. I have only one way of knowing if they did that, which I'm not even sure works, and it didn't report any such attempts. I'm talking about them visiting the blog like anyone else can.

      In general, every blogger likes visitors, right? I'm just as happy to get Russian visitors as anybody. The curiosity is the sudden surge in visits from Russia that we all saw and wondering why.

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  2. Hmm. I see it too. For the last week, 1810 from Russia, 1107 from the US. Interesting.

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  3. Viewing from Philippines ... that be me! Thanks for the great blog.

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  4. No change for me. I get regular traffic from Russia but it's almost always less than from Germany and Canada. I've seen a spike in traffic from China, although it's still less than 5% of my US traffic.

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    1. The exceptions are always the interesting part. I think I used to get regular visitors from Russia, too, just never ~9000 in one week. I'd think it was something I posted, and some sort of Russian Reddit equivalent, except for the fact it appears widespread.

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  5. I too have see the spike in my stats.

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  6. Almost four times the visits from Russia than the US.

    4650 vs 1200

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  7. 5 to 1, Russia Vs. USA, on Carteach0

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  8. They haven't got to me yet. 38800 USA. 9086 Russia for the week.

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    1. Still, you had about the same number of hits from Russia as I did, just way more US visitors than I had. I think you're a "positive" for hits from Russia, not negative.

      Unless you always get 9000 views from Russia every week.

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    2. I see what you mean SiG. I'll check more stats this morning. You might be right in the increase

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  9. Top three for the last month: Russia 762, US 470, China 69.

    Lifetime stats indicate a more normal set of numbers would have China & Russia neck and neck.

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  10. Have seen the same spike on my blog around same time as at SoE. So thanks to Google Translate I put out a proper greeting ;-)

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