Suspicious Visitors

If you look to the side, you will notice the counter that records the total number of page views of my blog.  It now stands at over 89,000.  That might sound impressive for a blog that has only been around for less than three years.  However, as I have written before, a sizeable portion of that number is from spammer robots rather than legitimate visitors.  A couple months after I started my blog there was a huge spike in the number of visitors.  Over 3,000 of those supposed page views were from a spammer site called "Vampirestat".  

Also at the side, you will see a traffic feed that shows the location of my visitors.   For quite a while I have been receiving a "visitor" from Mountain View, California almost every day.  I started getting suspicious when I saw three or four visits from Mountain View all within a couple minutes.  I searched for Mountain View on Google Maps and found that it is to the south of San Francisco. 

A few days ago, I found out that there is a website with my address, except that instead of "blogspot.com" it ends in "blogspot.fr".  (The "fr" would indicate France, would it not?)  I went to a site called "Scamadviser" where you can type in a web address and read information about that website.  So I typed in my address, but with the "blogspot.fr" ending.  There was a map showing the location of the website... and guess what?  The arrow pointed to a location just to the south of San Francisco.  It also said that the owner of the website was Google Ireland Holding in Dublin, Ireland.  I did some research, and discovered that Google's U.S. headquarters are in Mountain View, California, and that Google Ireland Holding is a company that Google uses to avoid European taxes.  (I also read that as of 2020, that tax loophole will be eliminated by the Irish government.)  So I guess that I can rest assured that there is nothing malicious about those visits from Mountain View.

However, in the past week I have seen a spike again in page views.  I have been getting up to 50 page views all at the same time.  The "visitor" is from Russia.  In the past week I have received 1146 views from there.  I am not by any means a crazy "conspiracy theorist", but I can't help but imagine some wild scenarios.  We have read about the Russians hacking the emails of the Democratic Party, and in the past week I have written two posts critical of Putin's boy, Donald Trump.  Could it be that the Kremlin is keeping tabs on my blog?  It is most likely just a coincidence, but I can't help but chuckle at the thought of my little old blog being viewed as a threat to Putin!

I would be interested in hearing from other bloggers as to whether they are receiving traffic from Russia.

And if you Russians are actually reading my posts...
"PUTIN IS A JERK!"