A Question for Other Bloggers


Before I pose the question I have to offer a little background. In the past year or so visits to my little blog have steadily risen to around 600 a day. At this point I am speaking specifically of the Blogger version of Urban Simplicity, not the Wordpress version, which of course is it's mirror blog. Blogger is the primary blog and I upload it to Wordpress. To some this many visits may not seem a lot but to me it is. I figure if even just a portion of the visitors stay around it makes it worth it for me to keep going. Anyhow, about a week ago--maybe a bit longer--I noticed spikes in visits...drastic spikes. That's an image of the past week above; even on busier days the stats never spiked like that, now it's a daily occurrence. At first I was thrilled that the visits had tripled and on some days quadrupled. I thought maybe a popular site had linked me somewhere and were leading people to my blog. Then, after a bit more scrutiny, I noticed that most of the hits or visits--thousands of them a day sometimes--where coming from Bulgaria. Bulgaria now represents the most hits per day from any other country. Prior, it was always the U.S. first, then Canada, followed by Australia, the European Union, and South America (mostly Brazil). You can see this represented below...the darker the image the more visits from that country (look how dark Bulgaria is). After doing a couple Google searches I found a few others that have had this same phenomenon. One commenter on another site said that they were likely "bot" generated searches. What, I wonder are they searching for. So the question is, have any of you ever experienced this before? Also, is this blog about to be hacked? I have not contacted blogger yet because they do not allow you to contact them (brilliant)...only through forums, which I don't really care for. Anyhow, if anyone has any info on this I would love to hear it, and likely so would a few others.

This said, if you're a regular reader of this blog and you see that I stop posting for a few days or there is something unlike I would post here (such as if I got hacked) please check the mirror blog (which is not experiencing this issue). But, then again who knows...maybe, for some reason the good people of Bulgaria have suddenly found my blog very interesting. And thank you to those who do visit, link, follow, and comment; it makes me know that I am not tapping away at my keyboard into a void. Peace.

Comments

Hi Joe, Do you use a service that tracks IP addresses of visits, such as Statcounter.com? That might answer your question about who and what. I agree with the opinion it may be a bot search engine of some type. I believe you may have option of blocking some IP addresses from viewing. Might be a good time to change your password, too, just as a proactive measure. I do enjoy reading your blog, though I haven't commented in a while. I often see various, interesting bike posts at other locations and wonder if you've seen the same! Take care.
Yeah,I've noticed this at times myself,also from Bulgaria...my thoughts mirrored yours as well. IDK about being hacked,I've no experience with that persoanlly,but like Clare said,maybe it's time to change up to a new password.

I didn't know you were on Wordpress as well. I hope you'll pardon me that I just clicked "Follow" over there and will more-than-likely be reading that site,since I'm there already and that's where my blog is (well...the one I stil use,anyways :p) :)

The Disabled Cyclist
Joe George said…
Clare and DC...Thanks for your comments. Clare, I used to have a counter such as the one you suggested but every time a person visits my blog they are sent a cookie. If they have sensitive internet security program it may deem my blog "unsafe." Anyhow--and this is interesting--in the last two days the "surges" from Bulgaria have subsided (I'm back to a respectable 500-600 hits a day). Did they read what I wrote, I wonder?
Joe George said…
DC...I also forgot to mention. Thanks for following. I started the wordpress version a couple years ago after I was randomly locked out of the blogger blog.