China Spikes in Views on Blog
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Hi, how are you all dealing with sudden abnormally large spikes of views from China? This doesn’t feel normal. They now come 2nd is stats only to the UK, but China is not my usual larger share of audience.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Sudden traffic spikes from specific countries (especially China) are often bot traffic or referral spam, not real visitors.
What to check:
- Referral sources:
- Go to Stats → Referrers
- See where the traffic is coming from
- Suspicious domains = likely spam
- Page views vs visitors:
- High page views but short visit time = bots
- Engagement:
- Are they leaving comments or interacting? Probably not if it’s bots
What you can do:
- Ignore it – Bot traffic doesn’t hurt your site, just inflates stats
- Use Jetpack security features (if available on your plan)
- Report suspicious activity to WordPress.com if it continues
Common issue: This happens to many sites – bots scan WordPress sites regularly. As long as your site is secure and you’re not getting spam comments, it’s usually harmless.
Stats guide: https://wordpress.com/support/stats/
Anyone else experiencing this? Let us know!
- Referral sources:
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I had spikes in traffic from Gansu, China on 10/09, 10/14, 10/30, and 10/31. Engagement rate <1%, engagement time 0 sec. WordPress doesn’t show China as the source of these spikes but Google Analytics does. Harmless but they do mess with my visitor stats.
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happening to me for several weeks now… very annoying as I know it is not real engagement
I just would like to understand WHY this is happening and if I need to do something about it to stop it
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Those spikes in visitors happen but they are completely harmless so you mustn’t and can’t do a thing to prevent them from hitting your site
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Same here. I’m getting huge spikes in traffic from China, definitely bots. I think they harvested the url from BlueSky.
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My site not on WordPress but got same visits from langzu and singapur daily https://www.techexplainedeasy.blogspot.com
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Been having the same issue for two months, since Sept 26 and my last interaction with Help, China represents 45% of my traffic. Prior is was maybe 2%. The problem started in August and I had dozens of spam comments on older posts. And as of Nov. 22 I am close to 1,000 views from China just for today. I have done everything that has been suggested. Pretty sure keeping stats was part of the service I signed up for but now that part is useless. I refuse to pay an upgrade fee in order for WP to allow me to protect my blog. This should be something WP does for all members. It is certainly ruining my enjoyment of writing my blog. This many views for a prolonged period can’t just be curious bots benignly visiting blog posts.
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I’ve got my comments set to close after a week. The Chinese bots are all hitting the same 9 or 10 articles that got linked on BlueSky. I suspect that’s where all the spam is coming from. All the articles they’re hitting have their comments shut down.
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Thanks I closed my comments as well, and yes that did stop the spam. I just find it shameful that the only way WP says I can fix it/stop the hits from China is to pay more money. In other words there is an ability to control it, but they want to make a buck in order to help us.
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All WordPress.com sites include our Akismet anti-spam service that starts working immediately to filter spam messages in contact forms. So you mustn’t pay to stop spam comments. You must simply mark spam comments as spam so our spamfilter can learn – https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/form-block/view-contact-form-messages/#mark-a-form-message-as-spam
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It’s not really spam I’m worried about since I close my comments after a week. It’s the fact that the bots make tracking real traffic impossible.
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Welcome to the internet or do you think other platforms are free from those bots? And don’t think a country or IP blocker solves the problem as those bots spoof their IP address.
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WordPress.com was free from Chinese bots a few months ago and in general was dependable and didn’t get you on blacklists.
Feel free to type useless comments that offer no solutions, information, or even educated guesses. I will feel equally free to explore the reasons for the sudden infestation.
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@bookmarksandstages @sallybr @randydafoe @srogouski, thanks for all the info you shared here. You’re not alone in this.
I shared a possible workaround in another topic, which included toggling the “Prevent third-party sharing” option on. Can you please give this one a try and let me know if that helps a bit?
Thank you!
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I’ve also had a huge increase in traffic/visitors from China since beginning of Nov. It’s totally out of character for my site. WordPress Support suggested it was crawl bots. I have a teensy site on a personal plan so my options for analysis & my knowledge is really limited. This is just a creative hobby for me, so alot of the explanations are going over my head! I tried the suggested block 3rd party & AI training setting; made no difference. I switched to private for a while, then made my site public again yesterday & already the problem is back in full force. I’m somewhat relieved that I’m not alone, but that doesn’t solve the issue, and I feel sorry for those whose stat figures are really vital. My concern was I was being plagiarised or being used for AI training against my permission. If that’s not what’s going on, I guess I have to learn to live with it.
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