Blog Stats

Most bloggers already know this but non-bloggers probably not: there are all kinds of statistics available in the Google blog system.  These include:

1.  Total and per-post hits per day, week, month, year, all time.

2.  Sources of hits by referring website or URL.

3.  Audience stats that list the number of hits by country.

It's this last one, countries, that got me amazed, curious and suspicious.  By far, the most hits are from the USA.  Russia is in second place, followed by Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, and the UK.  Latvia, a newcomer to the stats, is in 8th place and coming on strong.

Russia?  Latvia?  WTF?  Latvia had 147 hits in the last few days, all on one 2-year old post about a remote campground in northern Quebec.  Said post had a total of 245 recent hits so not all are from Latvia.

I've researched and determined that my suspicions were justified.  Most, if not all, of the Eastern European hits are from surfing spammers using automated techniques, hoping you'll get curious and click on the referring URL.  If you do, you'll get a website selling porn or other nasty stuff.  Spammers are good at hiding their tracks: the hits that appear to be coming from Russia/Latvia could be coming from anywhere, including the USA.  Eastern Europeans are popular fall guys these days.