One of the most fun things about blogging is reading your statistics. Blogger.com provides all sorts of information, such as how many people read the blog, which entries are most popular, and the types of things people search that lead them to stumble upon the blog. They even show you the countries of the world where people are reading your online writings. It doesn't surprise me that I have ten people in France who read Happy in Hainesport. They are my cousins. Every month I pick up about a dozen readers from places like Australia, India, Germany, and Trinidad and Tobago. I have noticed that people find me by googling "kumihimo" and "can you catch a bear with a tampon," so I assume this is how I snare the occasional Tobagonian.
So, why are all these Russians tuned into Happy in Hainesport? Blogger tells me I have more than sixty Russians in my audience. Since only about one hundred Americans read the blog, the number of Russians is a statistical anomaly. Has the word gotten out in the the former USSR that Hainesport is one of the finest places on earth? Do members of the fast growing Russian middle class want to vacation in Las Vegas as I did? Or do they just want to sew a new ironing board cover? I decided to look into this.
I found out those dastardly Russians (more accurately those dastardly Russian machines - there are no humans viewing the blog) are up to no good. In some cases they are looking for email addresses so they can spam. Other times they steal blog content for use on their blog sites. Some bloggers consider this positive if there is a link back to the original blog site, but the link back to the real author is often missing. In that case, the blogger has been robbed. In almost all cases, the Russian site posting the stolen material is generating advertisement revenue from the articles they hijack.
Some people pay to block Russian spammers. They use things called "plug ins" to get the job done. Just about the time I caught on to the Russians, they disappeared. I read that the Russian page views can disappear if you refuse to click on any links in your statistics log. Ignore them, and they will go away. Isn't it comforting to know that, even in the cyber world, the old wisdom still holds true?
So you are famous in Russian, too, huh? lol!
ReplyDeleteOne day I had a pageview from a country I'd never even heard of - I had to google it to find out where it was!
I'm still waiting to catch on in Swaziland.
ReplyDelete