Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Russians are coming! I wish most of them would go away.

In "Добро пожаловать в мой русский посетителей" I speculated that many of the Russian visits to this blog may be spammers looking for email addresses.  I may have gotten that partly right.

I read that "referral spam" has become quite common on blogs with small audiences.  The idea is that the little-guy bloggers, like me, are so eager for traffic that they check out some of the linking sites to see what has been written about them.  These sites can be pornography or other traps to suck in users.

Some of these sites are obvious and I couldn't figure out why they would be referring to my site.  Those I didn't even check. Russia is known as a large source of spam, but most of my email spam is Turkish or Japanese.  So I assume that most, if not all, the references to my blog from Russia are spam referrals.

I am certain that none of the Russian visitors know me; the few Russians I know have my email address or can get it from friends.  No Russian sent me email about my blog.

Gosh, I might say the same thing about French visitors.  The readers from France has gone from one or two a week to four or five a day.  None of my friends living in France have mentioned anything.  Claude, Christian, and Birahim, are you reading this?

I also had a recent spike in visits from Italy, but I had an explanation for that.  Our son was in Milan on business.  Thanks, son, for reading your father's ramblings.