Friday, February 21, 2020

RFI False Statistics

My site is hosted by Blogger, mainly because I didn't know what else to do when I originally started this mess.  There have been a few potholes in my driveway, but not much I couldn't handle.

Until now.

Now, and by that I mean over the past 90 days, I notice that some of my posts are getting pageviews or hits that I strongly suspect come from a bot.  My reasoning is that certain restaurant reviews are much more popular than anyone would expect, and while I (so far) have no way of telling just who it is that's looking at which post and for how long, I know that some of the Referring URLs and Referring Sites are from such URLs as http://aubepine.best/ and http://arrent.best/ (actual site names).

There are others, but all have the .best suffix.  When I click on one, I sometimes get a page that displays phone numbers.  Suffice to say, I'd like to block these idiots, whoever they may be.

Would someone with a good deal more knowledge than I have point me in the right direction?

3 comments:

Chuck Pergiel said...

I too use Blogger, and I sometimes look at the statistics. It's encouraging when the number of hits go up, but beyond that I am not sure there is anything there. Referring sites have no references to me. Posts I put up ten years ago routinely get marked as most popular. I tried using some tools once to look a little deeper, but they didn't really tell me anything. Every once in a while I will get a whole bunch of hits, but I've never figured out why. I figure someone must come across something they like and they post a link on some popular site and then I get an avalanche of hits. Anyone, I write because I am compelled to. If anyone reads it, that's a bonus.

Ed Bonderenka said...

I just looked at my stats. haven't in a while.
I'm surprised that 40 views, the highest referral, came from another blog.
It never occurred to me that people use other's blogs as their RSS feeds.
Every now and then, I'll use as a blog title something that might attract web search bots, like my latest, to see if views go up.
I typically get 100+ views, but once or twice it was over 300 due to that.

CWMartin said...

Get an answer to this one, and you'll be the most popular blogger ever!