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.
* * *
"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. "
* * *
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?
7 comments:
I am perplexed with web scraping. What happens to all this data/photographs/videos. Who cares? Why have duplicate copies in giant web servers? It costs something (although possibly minimal) to store this garbage multiple places. The big question is how do the web scrapers derive revenue from this data? They sell it to someone who wants to do what with it?
The Texas photographer, Kirk, got so angry with the bots/scrapers, he totally eliminated his blog.
That being said, it is always nice to know that there are real humans reading our film photography blogs too. I for one enjoy this one!
That's a good question. What is in it for the scrapers?
Seems like a worthwhile question to pose to AI.
Blogs are past their prime in general I think. A lot. of people have gone to varios forms of social media. I'm going to keep at it for a while longer, and I'm hoping. you two and my other favorites will hang in there too.
PS: I did submit your question directly to Google AI Search and got.a lengthy reply explaining the economics of web scraping. Training Large Language Model AI plays a role.
I rarely I’d ever check the analytics of my blog, but I admire you for doing so. I hope you keep it going. I think there’s a value in blogging that newer forms of social media lack, namely permanence and search-ability.
Thanks, Joe. I mostly enjoy and appreciate Blogger. It certainly takes care of a lot of. the details which allow posting a combination of words and pictures. I originally did that in the early years with a website, but it was quite an energy drain to do all that coding.
Google pitches their analytics as a business tool, but it is hard to imagine that can be. useful in any real way given the amount of bot pollution.
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