High volume of traffic from various blogspot TLDs. Any ideas why?

[Clinton]

Over the last couple of days my logs are showing a high volume of traffic from a variety of blogspot TLDs (showing as referrers). Examples:

http://weprovide4u.blogspot.com.br/
http://weprovide4u.blogspot.in/
http://weprovide4u.blogspot.mk/
http://weprovide4u.blogspot.fr/
http://weprovide4u.blogspot.com/?m=1
etc.

The IPs of these visitors (bots?) are all over the place - India, Thailand, Macedonia.
IP: 173.212.220.118 Hostname: vmi109332.contaboserver.net
Browser: Chrome version 0.0 running on Win8.1
IP: 62.210.13.190 Hostname: 62-210-13-190.rev.poneytelecom.eu
Browser: Chrome version 56.0 running on Linux
IP: 61.12.12.147 Hostname: indiafw.jumpstart.com
Browser: Chrome version 53.0 running on Win10
and so on.

All of those pages seem to be a copy of an article I posted at a friend's site (complete with links to me). Such copying goes on all the time, so that's not the issue. The question I'm struggling with is why am I getting traffic from these pages.

The traffic is obviously not human. But even if it's bot, why take the trouble of creating multiple pages of my article on different blogspot TLDs and send bots from a variety of different IPs to visit those blogspot pages and follow the links to my site?

These visitors never stay more than a few seconds and don't visit any other pages. The number of visitors is under 100 a day so it's not likely to be a DDOS attempt.

Any suggestions?

 

[Dmitri Fantastic]

Filter as spam referrals and don't bother. I am blocking new spam referrals on a weekly basis. Focus on real traffic and f*** bots.

 

[The Byre]

Focus on real traffic and f*** bots.

What a great idea for TV programme!

Cue that dark brown voice!

"The BBC gave you Robot Wars and ABC gave you Battlebots - but now, on Byre Television, we give you F*** Bots!"

What a concept! I feel a treatment and a pilot shoot coming on right now!

 

[Clinton]

Filter as spam referrals ...

Filter on what? IP? Country? User agent? Ban everyone using any version of Chrome? Or ban all blogger referred traffic?

 

[UKSBD]

Doesn't blogspot return the TLD based on where searcher is from?
IE.
The article hasn't been replicated on all the different TLD's the TLD automatically changes based on where the traffic is coming from

 

[Clinton]

The visitor from the .com.br site had an IP based in Germany.

The one from the .co.uk had an Indian IP (which fits what you say above)

The visitor from the .com site had an IP based in Bangkok.

 

[SEO Lady]

I don't think this tool will specifically help in this case, but I use this web app to automatically add filters to GA
https://referrerspamblocker.com/

Here's the 'Blacklist' of over 400 spam referrers: https://referrerspamblocker.com/blacklist

 

[Martyn_sa]

Filter on what? IP? Country? User agent? Ban everyone using any version of Chrome? Or ban all blogger referred traffic?

Try an 'include' filter based on hostname - along the lines of
translate\.googleusercontent\.com|www\.yoursite\.co\.uk|yoursite\.co\.uk

 

[Clinton]

Thanks for all the suggestions about GA filters etc. But I'm aware of all of those. My problem isn't about how to get GA to stop recording these hits. (In fact, I'll probably remove the GA code from this site altogether at some point! )

Let's return to the original purpose of this thread as I feel we're getting a bit sidetracked.

The OP was in the hope that someone would be able to explain the possible purpose of this traffic. With some of the malicious traffic, it's easy to see the vulnerability they are looking for. Sometimes it's just a mail harvester, sometimes it's probing for a particular known plugin flaw, sometimes it's looking for a form or trying to get a link.

What is this about?

 

[UKSBD]

Referrer spamming, hoping someone goes to look at the site after seeing it in their stats.

Extra bonus if the person then asks about it in a forum.

 

[Clinton]

Thanks, but referrer spamming tends to be with the intent of getting someone to visit your site where you're pitching something (... or are at least hosting CPM ads). Why would you referrer spam to get traffic to a blogger URL that has an article copy with links back to my own site?

I mean, it's nice of them to get my article more views, and I'm touched they've gone to all this trouble to get me to visit a copy of my article, but can't help feeling that there's got to be something in it for them.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Traffic, plain and simple. If you see links to your site, you will investigate. Nothing more maliscious than that, pure referral spam

 

[rizbit]

could it be hacking attempt. I onec had lots of traffic to blog i then found they were using bot to try to hack in to the login section via the main domain

 

[webgeek]

OWG hit it on the head squarely.

This type of referrer spam is designed to inflate their traffic numbers by spamming your analytics. It's nothing more than when you go to LinkedIn and view someone's profile - a certain % of those people will return and look at your profile (solely because you looked at them first).