strange traffic from out-of-country

  • Unknown's avatar
    peteroakcanada · Member ·

    Hello, two days ago I created a new blog. It’s based in Canada. I haven’t yet promoted or linked to it from anywhere.

    But when I look at the stats, I’m seeing as many visits from Romania, as there are from Canada. This blog is intended mostly for Canadians — if we gets lots of want-to-be applicants from other countries, it could destroy us. Our original site (not on WordPress) gets by far the highest proportion of traffic from Canada, as would be expected — Google obviously knows we’re in Canada. So I’m concerned to see this high proportion of traffic from out-of-country with a new WordPress.com blog.

    Is this an issue specific to WordPress.com? Are other WordPress users somehow finding us? (And why would Romania stand out… we have absolutely no connection to that part of the world.) I know there’s no way to block other countries, I understand, but the traffic is very strange.

    I’ve turned off pingbacks and trackbacks in case that has anything to do with it. I’ve also removed ‘Toronto’ and ‘Canada’ from my wordpress.com/me profile. I’ve also disabled comments and ‘follow blog’. But I’m really grasping at straws here. If we get lots of international traffic I’d have to shut it down.

    Here are the stats on day 3 after creating the blog — but not yet promoting or linking to it from anywhere: Canada 5 / United States 5 / Romania 4 / European Union 2 / Germany 1. I know the numbers are very low, we haven’t launched yet.

    P.S. I’m purposely not mentioning which blog it is because I don’t want to attract yet more traffic from far-flung corners of the globe. This forum post is using a separate WordPress account.

    Thank you for any suggestions!

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    If your site is 1) set to public, and 2) has published posts on it, it can already be discovered via Reader Search, tag listings and recommended sites in the Reader, even if it’s brand new and not indexed with search engines yet.

    So it is very possible that people can already be discovering the site and getting to it from the Reader.

    The fact that you’re based in Canada also by no means prevents search engines from showing your content to people in other countries. Search engines return results based primarily on site content that matches the search terms used. Metrics like location are just used as additional factors in top of that to further refine search results, but is not the primary consideration.

    P.S. I’m purposely not mentioning which blog it is because I don’t want to attract yet more traffic from far-flung corners of the globe. This forum post is using a separate WordPress account.

    Without knowing what site you’re speaking about so we can actually check it, that’s as much as I’m able to help here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    peteroakcanada · Member ·

    Hi Kokkieh, thanks for your response!

    I’m fully aware that the site is public to all countries — but this doesn’t mean that 50% of our traffic should be coming from Romania (I have nothing against Romania, personally!).

    The power of the Internet today, thanks to the likes of Google and Bing, is that most traffic is fairly relevant, and there is an emphasis on traffic from within the same country.

    I wasn’t aware of WordPress.com’s internal search features / Reader Search & recommended sites. Is there a way to disable this / opt out?

    I’d say that if WordPress.com’s features are bringing mostly traffic from other countries, this is a serious design flaw, and could force many small local businesses to have to move their sites elsewhere. This would be unfortunate because WordPress.com is great in so many other ways!

    Without knowing what site you’re speaking about so we can actually check it, that’s as much as I’m able to help here.

    Is there a way I can send you this without publishing it in a public support forum? I’m wary of bots/scammers/trolls etc who may be roaming here.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @peteroakcanada it hasn’t caused issues with others — people viewing your site won’t hurt it.

    If you’ll get in touch from the correct account, using http://wordpress.com/help/contact, we’ll work on finding a way to block your site.

    You can also hide from search engines under https://wordpress.com/settings

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