Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Blog stats weirdness

This blog is hosted on blogger, google's free blogging platform.  There are a couple of ways to get statistics about the blog, like rates of visits and where they're from.  One approach is to start from the nanoscale views blogger homepage and click "stats", which can tell me an overview of hit rates, traffic sources, etc.  The other approach is to go to analytics.google.com and look at the more official information compiled by google's tracking code. 

The blogger stats data has always looked weird relative to the analytics information, with "stats" showing far more hits per day - probably tracking every search engine robot that crawls the web, not just real hits.  This is a new one, though:  On "stats" for referring traffic, number one is google, and number three is Peter Woit's blog.  Those both make sense, but in second place there is a site that I didn't recognize, and it appears to be associated with hardcore pornography (!).  That site doesn't show up at all on the analytics page, where number one is google, number two is direct linking, and number three is again Woit's blog.  Weird.  Very likely that this is the result of a script trying to put porn spam in comments on thousands of blogs.  Update:  As I pointed out on social media to some friends, it's not that this blog is porn - it's just that someone somewhere thinks readers of this blog probably like porn.  :-)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Doug,

This is called "referrer spam":

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/referrer-spam-get-rid/135855/

Douglas Natelson said...

Thanks, Anon! That was very informative, and much more interesting that I was expecting.