Blogger's stats are getting more and more bizarre. Here's their list of my top referrers in the past week:
It's possible that I'm actually getting "traffic" -- presumably from fake-intelligence systems based there -- from Brazil, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It's not possible that anyone is coming here by clicking links on the Pizza Hut and Coca-Cola websites. That's just not something that's happening.
Does anyone have a theory as to what's going on? I'm having a hard time imagining how even bots could make it look like they were coming here via Pizza Hut.
5 comments:
Referrer is merely a header that the browswr sets in a text based request. If they write a program that uses a hhtp library its as simple as like request.setReferrer("pizzahut.com"); But why they would want to is the question. To hide that they're acraping your content for AI?
If they wanted to hide something, you'd think they'd set the referrer to google.com or something like that -- something that would be expected to be a major source of traffic and wouldn't stand out as obviously fake.
There are also, or at least used to be, chrome plugins that allowed you to set things like this in your browser. Maybe some tech savy guy set his referrer to always show pizzahut because he thought its funny.
This phenomenon of corporate referrers, which I am also seeing, is superimposed on already ridiculously inflated Page Views (eg 50 fold increases, lasting several days - but unrelated to any particular post); which I have never seen before in the past 15 years.
Here are some of my top referrers for the past week - also on blogger - for comparison:
transferwise.com, edmunds.com, lanacion.com.ar, umn.edu, cnn.com, dell.com, homdepot.com, github.com, kyoto-u.ac.jp, taobao.com, ea.com, aldi.com.au, cornell.edu, wiley.com, moonton.com, coinbase.com
A very wide and apparently random selection of institutions.
Not sure what amuses me more -- the obviously silly ones, or stuff like The Economist and "gob.mx" (government of Mexico, lolwut) because they sound antithetical to everything here. OTOH, Rosetta Stone is a little synchy.
Post a Comment