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.

Добро пожаловать в мой русский посетителей

Не понимаю русский язык.

Welcome to my Russian readers.  I don't understand Russian.  I forgot most of what I learned in summer school over 45 years ago.

I am a bit surprised about a sudden spike in visits to my blog from Russia.  Generally most visits are from the U.S. with a scattering of six or seven other countries.  Often, the second largest number of visits are from Russia.  But for the past few days there have been over 40 visits per day from Russia. 

What is happening?  I don't think many of my blogs have a specific Russian interest.  Are a bunch of spammers trying to mine my entries for email addresses?  Have a bunch of friends told each other about this blog because they find it interesting.  We hosted a Russian from Petrozavodsk last year and I did give her my card.  Irina, did you pass it along to your friends?

Whatever!  I hope you find some interesting commentary here.