Blogger offers many statistics about what kind of visitors see these blogs. Unfortunately, most of them are all but useless because most of the visitors are imaginary, or anyway mechanical. For some reason, folks in Russia seem to think that there is a road to profit in having Internet robots visit blogs so that the statistics will show visitors from what appear to be search engines or sometimes YouTube videos or once, recently, Facebook. (Facebook was easy to recognize as fake because it just said facebook.com; I get a lot of real referrals from Facebook and they always include the full address of the link, with sub-directories and all.)
The idea is that we bloggers will be so excited by these visits that we will click on the apparent referrers and give them additional visitors and thus money. And I'm sure every one of us has done that. Once. Each. I'm really not sure that all this effort is going to pay off, but yet they still keep trying. It must be cheap is all I can figure.
It pisses me off. I don't mind not having many readers. I'm not sure I would mind not having any readers. (It certainly would remove any pressure to be good.:)) But it seems, even aside from being tricky and slimy, just mean to pretend to be a visitor to a stranger's blog when you're just angling for pennies.
So the last couple of days, when I still got Russian visitors but no longer got mysterious and improbable referrers in my stats, have been comparatively pleasant. I'm hoping that Blogger has finally figured out a block for this activity. I'm sure the Russians will come up with another workaround pretty soon; they always seem to. But it's a nice break, and I plan to enjoy it as long as it lasts.
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