I know there's a general shortage of posts at the moment, and off-beat topics are tolerated Over the past two months the traffic to my blog has changed markedly. Usually, the top five countries are US, UK, Germany, Australia and a toss up between Canada and France. Over the past two months, however, Russia has gained the top spot relegating the US to second by thousands of hits each month. I'm mystified by this development, particularly in light of the Russian economy being deeply in the toilet at the moment, if not well and truly on the way to the sewage farm. So, why this sudden blip on the radar? Any suggestions? Cheers Desmond
You could always try to cash in on the development. Feature more, eh, extravagant varieties that'll cater to the tastes of the nouveau rich of the Russian steppes and perhaps open a shop on your premises? This would be an obvious choice: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/OMEGA-CON...D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557Purchases made through these links may earn this site a commission from the eBay Partner Network
Are you certain this is genuine traffic and not something else like referral spam? Is all the traffic coming from one or two sources or is it more general?
Bots (which steer false clicks to sites) and Rich Oligarchs with other people's money to burn perhaps.
Russia is 0.01% of our traffic, I'd suggest the sites probably being scraped or something by bots, Russian traffic unlike most European traffic is very rarely English speaking sites. To put it in perspective Russia has about 5% English speakers while the Netherlands has something over 90% and most are easier to understand than Victorians.
My blog is getting hammered by the Russians http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=799451 Similar question on a different forum... there seems to be a common pattern here. Very recently big traffic out of Russia... my guess it's not people and their new found love for your blog but bots One suggestion that was made... block of ip's from Russia (leaving out the 0.001 that might be legit.traffic
Might be a bug in the monitoring. Or an IP block got moved around. If total traffic stayed even but the mix changed then this is the likely reason. By block I mean block of numbers. These can get reassigned due to need and monitoring software might not update the new address location. Also is this stat from your isp or or a web counter? If it's from your isp. Check your ftp and make sure your not hosting files that you did not put there.
I gather Desmond's website is a Google blogspot, so I imagine the options for blocking traffic are limited. If it was hosted somewhere else I'd have suggested using CloudFlare.
Thanks all for your input - much appreciated. Hmm, I'm partial to the bot attack explanation. The stats come from Google. The blocking opportunities are very limited and I might try to lodge a query through their usual convoluted channels. Cheers Desmond
Its not hard to identify those involved with referral spam and it's clearly interfering with the normal functioning of the web, so I am mystified why Google hasn't yet bludgeoned them to death with a large cold fish. Below is my usual daily wearer:
