28 August 2025

Stats

Top visitor countries in last thirty days

Visitors who do not publish blogs of their own may not be aware that in the background "Blogger" provides bloggers with surprisingly comprehensive and up-to-date stats about how their blogs are doing. For example, you can find out your league table of visits by country. You can also find out the number of "hits" your top twenty blogposts had in the last twenty four hours.  In addition, you can  see tracking graphs and suchlike.

By the way, most of my visitors during the past six months reside in the USA, far outnumbering both Hong Kong and Great Britain who are second and third respectively on my list.  For several years, Great Britain and the USA were running neck and neck but not any more. In the last thirty days, "Yorkshire Pudding" has attracted 107,000 visits from America alone.

It sometimes bemuses me which blogposts appear in my 24 hour list and after twenty years of regular blogging I find I had totally  forgotten many of those posts. It can almost be like reading the ramblings of a complete stranger. For example this old post received fifty four readers yesterday. I wrote it on March 10th 2020 just before Great Britain went into its first COVID-19 lockdown. I guess it is a little piece of history now.

Every blogpost I have published in the past year has received over two hundred visits. However, some posts have attracted considerably more people. My "Quiztime" posts have been particularly fruitful with some of these receiving four or five hundred visitors. Posts that have been titled "Poem" are much less popular which is somewhat discouraging I must say even though I am well aware that poetry is not everybody's cup of tea.

In the past few days, I have noticed something weird happening with my visitor stats.  My "Malton" post of August 20th has received 1098 visits, my "Slaithwaite" post from Monday night has attracted over seven hundred visits and yesterday's Beatles "Quiztime" has achieved a massive 1418 visitors already.

I am very suspicious of these recent  figures. They are way out of sync with my usual visitor pattern. However, it is pretty much impossible to report such an issue to "Blogger" which seems to have been designed with a well-constructed invisible barrier in place to deter questions, suggestions and complaints from users.

Please don't imagine that I am in any way obsessed with the stats that "Blogger" provides because I am not. It is just that occasionally I like to have a look at them to see what is going on behind the scenes.

32 comments:

  1. I have had over 5331 visits to my black bucket post so far today. I don't take the stats seriously.

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    1. Something is amiss right now. Previously, the number of "hits" you got was very plausible.

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  2. It seems there are bots, or AI, out and about, leaving pretend comments for websites. Perhaps that is the increase in visits. Not sure.

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  3. Surprising that visitors from the USA outnumber the UK.

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    Replies
    1. Well the USA contains a lot more people and they speak in a language that resembles English too.

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  4. That is interesting. It surprised me that your second highest was Hong Kong which has approximately one tenth the population of the UK.

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    1. In the past number two has sometimes been Singapore. All pretty strange.

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  5. I have noticed my post views have rocketed going from about 200 views to averaging 600 views, could it be blogger playing up again.

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    1. Could be. Something is not right at this point in time.

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  6. I'm like you. I'm not obsessed by the numbers, I just find them interesting.

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    1. Do we really need so many stats? Seems like a waste of time really.

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  7. It's probably just that Vlad fellow manipulating stats again.

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  8. I read on another blog recently that those jumps are caused by AI searching through posts for certain topics. Not sure if that is true, though.

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    1. It certainly has the whiff of truth Ellen.

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  9. Brazil in 4th place, Hong Kong 6th and Vietnam 9th have been responsible for a significant volume of the traffic to my blog over the last few months. Like you, I struggle to take the stats seriously .

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    1. If Google Blogger is going to keep churning the stats out, they ought to make them valid.

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  10. Mine usually seem to increase at the end of each month.

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    1. I have not noticed that trend Tasker.

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  11. I am like you too. I don't really look at numbers, but it is in fact interesting to see where some of the views were from.

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    Replies
    1. Well - when one is retired one has to find things to do.

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  12. I used to look at stats. Not any more. Whatever my posts get is what they get.

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    1. It's best not to obsess about those stats.

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  13. I'm not sure the stats really mean anything, or that comparing them across time matters. If Google tweaks the way it measures hits, for example, that could throw the numbers off. Like you I look at them very rarely out of curiosity but I don't set much store by them.

    I've also heard what others have said above, that some higher recent hit counts might be bots or AI scrapers. (I think I saw that on someone else's blog, so maybe you saw it too!)

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    1. An "AI scraper" sounds like something you might find in a lavatory.

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  14. Do you suppose that it is AI language learning model mining your posts? Blueberry yogurt!

    Will Jay

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    1. Well I do not know why you wrote "Blueberry yoghurt" Will. Is that your nickname?

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  15. Wordpress has a stats feature, too, and I do look at it, but take the results with a grain of salt. I don't get a lot of hits and I think that's partly because I have my blog set where it doesn't automatically figure into Google searches. I know when I'm Googling something I usually want facts rather than someone's blog entry about that topic. (which might be factual, but still...) Or maybe I'm just not a popular person.

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    1. Have you considered changing your perfume Kelly?

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Mr Pudding welcomes all genuine comments - even those with which he disagrees. However, puerile or abusive comments from anonymous contributors will continue to be given the short shrift they deserve. Any spam comments that get through Google/Blogger defences will also be quickly deleted.

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