Blessi Blog Stats--Those Darn Russian Naughty Sites

One of the pleasures of creating a blog is watching the audience numbers build.   I especially like looking at the number of readers from various countries.  I was so excited that people from Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, and other places would like to read about Blessi.  Most of the traffic comes from countries that have a large or growing population of Icelandic horses. 

Views by country for Blessi Blog

And then I noticed that I had a few viewers from Russia, which according to WorldFengur has only two registered Icelandic horses.  How cool I thought, there must be a growing interest in Russia in this breed.   And within a week, the number of viewers from Russia was way more than any other country except the US.  So I decided to look at the referring sites.

Referring sites for Blessi Blog

I thought that some of the sites looked really weird so I did a search in the on-line help of Blogger to try and figure out what was happening.  The ow.ly and tiny.cc looked a bit suspicious.  It turns out that spanners will surf to as many new blog sites as they can hoping that the new blogger will check her statistics, click on the link, and go to their web site as a customer or spam recipient.

Google's Blogger cautions: "It's even possible that the computers that we see reflected in our logs - Latvia, Poland, and Russia - are being controlled by porn spammers who live in England, Germany, or even the USA. Even spammers don't crap where they live. Referer spamming involves massive amounts of fake page accesses, against multiple websites."
Source:  http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2011/02/referer-spam-is-needlessly-alarming.html

Oh the joys of being a new blogger.  My apologies to anyone from Russia, Latvia, and Ukraine who may be genuinely interested in the Icelandic horse.


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