Blog Referrals from Russia?? on the Peoria.com Forums

Ok, I need your help deciphering this: lately I've noticed a substantial amount of traffic on my blog that is coming from Russia. I can't understand why! When I click on the link to see the referral site, it's usually some site that sells something totally unrelated to what I post about. As far as I can tell, there are no links whatsoever to my blog from any of those sites. How is this possible?

Google Analytics is picking up these Russian sites but SiteMeter is not. Any ideas? Should I be worried?

Assuming you use a blog service like Worpress or Blogger, you won't have much in the way of administrative control over who can and cannot visit your site.

If you were running your own server, you could block by IP or domain or country, but I don't think you'll have that option.

Regardless, so long as you have a good strong password on your blog, and you're not running any suspect third party content thru your blog (like Billy Dennis), you have nothing to worry about, other than slightly skewed statistics.

They are most likely just sites linking to you to piggyback off any Google juice you may have.

If you get a lot of that I would go to comment moderating and then don't publish any of them.

I'm using Blogger which I've been pretty happy with for the last 4 years and have never had any of the kinds of problems Billy Dennis has had.

The Russian referrals aren't commenting...I'm just getting traffic coming from those sites, which I thought was weird. I've had photos stolen by people in other countries before so I'll try to check up on the referrals when I can.

If it isn't spam, then that would strike me as weird. I get a few foreign referrals, but I usually have a pretty good guess as to why.

Sure would be nice to see the actual stats rather than jumping to conclusions.

I get similar hits on my photo website (not a blogging site) on occassion from Brazil.