50,000 and Counting

Sometime during the night the counter on my blog hit the 50,000 mark.  That may seem impressive since I have only had my blog for about a year and a half.  However, that number is of page visits not of individual visitors.  So if someone looks at several pages during a visit, that increases the number.

Also a sizeable percentage of that number are not from legitimate visitors.  In the first months of writing, when I would look at my statistics, the leading traffic sources were two websites... "vampirestat" and "7secretsearch".  They advertise themselves as "domain and site appraisal" services.  I did a bit of research, and one blogger who writes about tech issues said...

" just ignore all of that, as it is the product of worthless scumbag referrer spam-bots. Automated, unattended software programs generate these supposed "hits" on your site. They do not represent any human visitors and are not of any interest whatsoever. Do not visit the referring sites, because there is a high probability of malware."   (Tech lore by Igor)

I had over 5000 hits from those two sites.  I am also suspicious of the fact that I have had over 2100 views from Malaysia, over 1200 from Ukraine, and nearly 600 from Russia.  That seems a bit fishy to me.

I am also puzzled by the statistics on the most viewed posts.  Last February I wrote a post about the Mexican artist, José María Velasco.  That entry has been viewed 1309 times, and each day the number increases.  I did a "google search" of José María Velasco, and my blog post does not show up anywhere in the first several pages.  So where are these constant hits coming from??? 

Of course I have had many genuine, human visitors!  Some time ago I added a  "live traffic feed" gadget on the side of my blog.  It shows the cities of my visitors.  I know when some of my friends are reading my blog by the cities which are listed.  If I click on the "traffic feed" I can also see from where the visitors arrived.  Whenever I see one of the other blogs with which I am linked (such as "Babsblog" or "Marcoyucatan"), I am confident that those are legitimate visitors.  There are also a number of people who arrive directly.  I assume that they have liked my blog enough to bookmark it on their computer, and they come back to see what I have written.  There are some who visit on a daily basis... like the people from Albion, Pennsylvania or Norwich, England.  I would love for them to write a comment and say "hello", but I am pleased that they find my blog interesting enough to check daily. 

Well, even though that 50,000 number looks nice, it is actually a meaningless statistic.  But I truly appreciate the visits from living, breathing human beings out there!  ¡Muchas gracias!