Attack of the French Spam Bots

This blog normally gets a few hits per day, mostly from the United States but there are always a few each week from other parts of the world. Being the obsessive person that I am, I check the analytics of this blog each time I log in to publish a new post, so whenever there’s a substantial change to those analytics I notice it. For the past several weeks there’s been an increase in traffic, which would normally be a good thing, as I’d like more people to visit this blog, however I believe this increase is due to my blog falling victim to spam bots originating in France. According to the tools available in Blogger, the vast majority of daily visits now originate in France and the traffic sources all go back to websites that redirect the user to sexual services advertisements. At first I was perplexed and almost amused, as I figured this surge in spam visitors would go away after awhile, but now I find it very annoying. It all started around the time that I published my writing piece on the Top Posts of this blog, and unfortunately it has greatly distorted the statistics of which posts have gotten the most views. Were this a big-name blog with a vast readership, this spam attack would hardly alter the statistics of any given post, but the fact of the matter is that this blog has a small readership, so it doesn’t take many spam hits to throw everything off. Of course, for you, the reader, this is a non-issues since you don’t see any of the analytics of this website, but for me it’s something to get worked up about, as I treat this blog like it’s my child and I don’t like anyone messing with my children—even if it’s not doing me any real harm.

Unfortunately there’s not much I can do about these spam bots, as Blogger doesn’t have any tools for blocking them. The only real countermeasure I have is to temporarily revert posts back to draft form for a number of days and adjust the URLs before republishing them, which is why you may have noticed that certain posts have been disappearing and reappearing lately. This however has had only minimal success, so it would seem that I’m out of luck on this matter. Hopefully my new website will have some actual defenses against this sort of thing.