# Why do I have so many hits from Russia on my blog?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 6, 2011, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050 "2011-07-06T16:16:49Z")
**Posts on this page:** 19
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/1 "2011-07-06T16:16:49Z")
I have a silly little blog that I write mostly for myself, but I am vain and like to check out the statistics from time to time to see who might be visiting and how they’re finding me. Some people reach my blog by searching for recipes or book reviews, and I know I have a few regular readers, mostly friends and family, who have me bookmarked.
What is confusing me is my apparent Russian fan base. By which I mean a few visits a day, not a whole lot but definitely making up a large percentage of my visits. It seems that [yandex.ru](http://yandex.ru), a Russian search engine, is bringing people to my blog because people are _searching for it specifically_, typing my blog’s url into the search bar. Why are people looking for me? I don’t think I know anyone in Russia, and besides, if they were a fan, wouldn’t they bookmark the site instead of searching for it all the time?
What’s the deal?
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### Author:  [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/2 "2011-07-06T16:22:19Z")
Because they are tired of getting hit _by_ blogs, which is customary in some countries in the world.
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### Author:  [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/3 "2011-07-06T16:38:03Z")
> [@Ludovic](#):
>
> Because they are tired of getting hit _by_ blogs, which is customary in some countries in the world.
I have to give it to you, that was good.
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### Author:  [@postcards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/postcards)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/4 "2011-07-06T16:43:49Z")
I have the same thing happening to me, except that, according to my Bravenet counter, these are _direct_ hits; whoever is visiting is typing the URL directly into their address bar, not finding me through Google or other search engines.
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### Author:  [@Floppy\_Joe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floppy_Joe)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/5 "2011-07-06T20:50:34Z")
Do you have any “comments” section of your blog turned off/denied? I had a photo library/blog inundated by spam comments posting their URLs for pharm/shoes/etc. crap. I had to turn off the comments because it got so bad. Although, most of my hits were coming from China. There is an entire spam industry in Russia.
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### Author:  [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/6 "2011-07-06T21:03:58Z")
> [@Floppy\_Joe](#):
>
> Do you have any “comments” section of your blog turned off/denied?
Comments aren’t turned off, but I’m hardly getting any comments posted at all, let alone any spam.
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### Author:  [@postcards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/postcards)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/7 "2011-07-06T21:24:17Z")
> [@Antigen](#):
>
> Comments aren’t turned off, but I’m hardly getting any comments posted at all, let alone any spam.
Same here. Plus, Blogger is pretty good at filtering spam comments (at least, in the few cases when I get spam in my comments).
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### Author:  [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2011, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/8 "2011-07-06T21:43:12Z")
My WAG would be some sort of trolling tool has your site logged and it trolls the site for comments that contain e-mail addresses to use for phishing/spam.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2011, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/9 "2011-07-07T02:21:41Z")
Antigen, can you PM me some recent IPs, dates and the exact yandex urls? Preferrably the landing page urls too, if you know that. I can check a few details.
Floppy Joe, was that Gallery 2 by any chance? It’s a spam magnet.
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### Author:  [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2011, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/10 "2011-07-07T16:21:48Z")
I seen web logs where people seem to be looking for particular scripts and such that have vulnerabilities. Some stock blogging software have had some nasty holes discovered in them over the years. They may be looking to see if your site uses a script/whatever with a known hole which can be exploited.
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### Author:  [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2011, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/11 "2011-07-07T17:55:16Z")
Bots
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### Author:  [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2011, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/12 "2011-07-07T18:21:48Z")
To a first approximation, if its on the internet, and its from Russia or Eastern Europe, its some sort of scam.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [July 8, 2011, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/13 "2011-07-08T22:52:13Z")
> [@Simplicio](#):
>
> To a first approximation, if its on the internet, and its from Russia or Eastern Europe, its some sort of scam.
This is often true, but the spam and scams from Russian IPs are usually blatant porn/pills/phishing, with no attempt to disguise what they’re doing. The less obvious forms of spam use proxies to disguise the location. The OP describes something more subtle - possibly a side effect of searching for blogs to spam, perhaps something else. I’d need more details to tell.
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### Author:  [@Antigen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antigen)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/14 "2011-07-09T00:43:09Z")
I’m not sure how to get more information for you…
All I have is this under “referring URLs” in my Blogger statistics tab:
> **[Яндекс](https://yandex.ru/showcaptcha?cc=1&mt=9B8C7954C8C77D2668C0E82DA336428F3BFAB0BF52D011862517D5D129791915CBDE97FCD714431EE29C6428801C209FDA96396E63F68B804B4B589F3CAC1C75F9F72356D776AFEBE63E33F7AD9A6285BA10CC61CA3C1DEF32C7508000B54A607F97D6606042B9D1F0F76DB2DD1C21107403DABE56111E044DA91CD63B&retpath=aHR0cHM6Ly95YW5kZXgucnUveWFuZHNlYXJjaD90ZXh0PWFudGlqZW5pY2RyaWZ0LmJsb2dzcG90LmNvbSZscj05MSZyZWRpcmNudD0xNjkxMjc1NzQ3LjE%2C_4358b8ce61772cebe64ddbec6bab73f1&t=2%2F1691275748%2Fd7e5e70bd42d13d5570ea05035a1daaf&u=f6496c38-3243cfe0-46cfef38-93b6c61&s=96c8b880907aa76336d4c9e096381258)**
>
> Найдётся всё
I have others on there, from Google searches and someone coming to my blog through facebook or the SDMB, but this week this specific one shows up as having referred to me **seven** times, which is as much as all other stuff combined.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/15 "2011-07-09T01:23:07Z")
> [@Antigen](#):
>
> I have others on there, from Google searches and someone coming to my blog through facebook or the SDMB, but this week this specific one shows up as having referred to me **seven** times, which is as much as all other stuff combined.
Based on limited information: it’s a spambot, probably designed to post forum spam, and it’s hitting your blog by mistake (or for reconnaissance). Its only side effect there is to leave the referrers you’re seeing.
It’s definitely not human, and almost certainly didn’t reach your blog via those yandex search pages. They were probably added by the spambot author for tracking or testing purposes.
It’s running on a Russian broadband network, possibly a botnet.
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### Author:  [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/16 "2011-07-09T04:41:25Z")
Are there logs you can analyze? I just set up log compilation on my webpage this week and discovered that one of the sites linking to my pages that merely shows up “unknown” under the simpler site statistics is in fact a TV Tropes page. If you can look into logs, you might be able to discover if there are links on some Russian sites that are prompting people to find you.
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/17 "2011-07-09T05:21:23Z")
> [@elfkin477](#):
>
> Are there logs you can analyze?
Blogspot doesn’t provide logs, just stats.
This is definitely a bot, not real referrers, as I said above.
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### Author:  [@enigmatic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enigmatic)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/18 "2011-07-09T10:12:50Z")
Have you searched to see whether any of your articles are being plagiarised?
If you find a lot of them somewhere else, possibly chopped into sections and full of nonsensical links it probably means that they are being used for very dodgy search optimisation.
Pro tip - if this is the case, _do not follow the links_ 😃
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### Author:  [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2011, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-have-so-many-hits-from-russia-on-my-blog/588050/19 "2011-07-09T23:02:05Z")
> [@enigmatic](#):
>
> If you find a lot of them somewhere else, possibly chopped into sections and full of nonsensical links it probably means that they are being used for very dodgy search optimisation.
Spammers call them autoblogs. Google calls them content farms. They’re usually made to host ads, not so much for SEO.
They’re very common, but not the problem in the OP.