Saturday, October 19, 2013

Who or what is trolling the blog

Unfortunately, this is a fairly low-traffic blog, in part due to my not pimping it everywhere else I go on the internet. People know that I'm a fan of those old movies starring a bunch of dead people most of whom they've barely heard of, but I don't generally go around telling people to visit my blog. Sometimes, I'll mention that something that's being talked about in a discussion forum references an old movie, and includ a link to the post I've done on the particular old movie in question. Or, if they're talking about newer films, I'll mention the older ones that did it first. Whenever I do that and check the site stats, I'll notice a small bump in page hits on those particular pages.

However, something strange has happened in the past month -- maybe longer, but I've only noticed it in the past month or so. A couple of posts have received a ridiculous number of page hits. Or, at least, way above anything that the site normally gets. The most recent example is the post from the beginning of the week on Broken Blossoms, which gave me the idea that perhaps there's traffic coming from China. My October 1 post mentioning China's National Day is another of the posts that saw a jump in traffic. But there are other posts that don't mention China at all, and have received even more hits, with the one on Buster Keaton's One Week being the one with the most hits. Besides, it's the US that is providing the most hits, with Russia being second.

There also doesn't seem to be a pattern when whatever is hitting the blog is doing so. There are breaks of two, four, six, and three days (in that order), and one break of a couple weeks, in when the various posts that got the big numbers of visits were done. And, after all, the top referring site is Google, surprise surprise. I'd think that search engine spiders would operate like clockwork, though, and that it would only result in slightly increased volume on every post.

I also don't see anything in search keywords generating site views that looks obvious. Any ideas?

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