Robotic Obfuscation

 I've been curious about the daily statistics about my blog's activity for some time.  I was certain the majority of the thousands of daily hits recorded were robotically generated.  I decided to seek a little more  clarity on the issue from the Google Search AI.  I thought the response was pretty good.

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 "The high number of hits to your blog from outside the U.S., specifically Singapore, is almost certainly caused by automated web scraping bots, aggregators, or RSS feed crawlers mapping or fetching your content, rather than real human readers.

Because your photography blog connealy.blogspot.com is highly respected in the niche film community, it is actively listed on global RSS syndication networks like FeedSpot's Top Vintage Camera RSS Feeds and frequently featured on prominent photography blogrolls like Mike Eckman dot Com.

Why Singapore?

Singapore is a major global cloud data center hub for Asia. Tech companies, search engines, and aggregation platforms host their automated bots, AI web crawlers, and RSS readers on cloud servers located there.

Every time one of these automated systems refreshes to check if you have posted a new entry—like your recent posts on the Minolta Hi-Matic 7s or Pinhole at the Rail Yards—it registers as a "pageview" or a "hit" in your Blogger stats, pinpointed to Singapore's IP addresses.

How to Tell the Difference

You can easily separate these phantom bot hits from real human readers by looking closer at your Blogger analytics:
Audience Retention: If the Singapore traffic has a bounce rate of nearly 100% and an average session duration of 0 seconds, it is a machine.

Referrer URLs: Check the "Referrers" tab in your stats. Bots often leave this blank or mask themselves as direct traffic, whereas real vintage camera enthusiasts will show up coming from places like Flickr, Mike Eckman, or search engines. "

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The questions that remains is, 

Why doesn't Google Blogger take a more pro-active approach to sorting out the robot-heavy traffic which is making the Google Analytics reports largely useless?