No offense to China, but…

I would ask if anybody else is seeing this on their WordPress stats, but I already know you are. For a few months now, the majority of the “views” I’ve been getting on my blog have been from China. But to my knowledge, I don’t have any followers there. I do have a number of blogging friends from around the world, as I’m sure most of us do, but none of mine are in China. I Googled this awhile back and found a new blogging friend, Rose, who has written this informative post about “bots” visiting our sites, and what she’s learned through her own research.

I’ve researched it some more and found pretty much the same information everywhere. “Bots” are not necessarily harmful to your site, (although some can be), and some of them are even good, like the ones that find your blog so it will come up when somebody searches one of your topics. If you are keeping track of your views and their origins because you are selling something, (like I was going to do in “Debra Kay’s Online Finger Puppet Emporium”), I can see where these false views would be very aggravating. Apparently, bots don’t even stay on your site long enough to read your posts, much less to buy anything. And what would bots buy anyway? Certainly not finger puppets. And you can’t tell me they are downloading the Foster and Panda coloring pages, because can bots even color? Still, they’re on there doing something.

I’ve looked into different ways to block or stop them from skewing my site stats, but I haven’t implemented any of they yet. I’m not quite as “tech savvy” as my amazing blog posts might lead you to believe, and I’ve been hesitant to add a firewall or a plug-in because I don’t want to mess anything up. We all know what happened when I “de-monetized” my blog and went from the Business Plan back to the Premium plan. See “We’re Back!” for the harrowing details.

I have Google Analytics for my Zazzle store, and I think I can apply it to my blog, but the instructions sounded a little complicated. On Google Analytics you can prevent a whole country from accessing your site, which might sound mean, but hey, if they’re just going to be bots….

As you can see, I don’t have that much traffic on Zazzle, and what sales I do get are almost always the “Vintage Sister Birthday Card”.

Completely customizable, you can make one with your own sibling photo, and change the text as well. You can also see the same basket chair in “Mid-Century Modern”.

So, at the risk of offending a real person in China who might decide to follow my blog, has anyone tried any of the suggestions that have been shared online to remedy this situation?