I’m Watching You Watching

On this blog, some entries are better written than others. Some entries are meaningless to anyone but my immediate family and friends. Sometimes what I write is insightful and full of a worldly understanding (Hey, no one else is going to say this about me. I might as well).

Like a good geek, I go through my logs from time-to-time (All right, I’m obsessed – so shoot me). It’s interesting to see whose coming here and what they’re reading. You couldn’t do this with a Google sized site, but most of the time I can track a reader as he decides where to go next. And, I’ll admit to doing a few “whois” searches to see who owns the IP address doing the browsing.

Looking at my log, I know that at one time my largest source of hits from search engines came about because I had misspelled he name of the comedian “Carrot Top!”

I’ve just started seeing a significant flow of traffic over the last few weeks to two IP addresses at Microsoft (65.54.188.40 and 65.54.188.42). Though AWStats doesn’t see them as a search engine spider, I believe that’s what they are. This month I’ve had over 20 MB in bandwidth and 1,600 hits go to those two addresses (and mine is a little, personal site with only around 220 MB of content – much of that in photos). This is probably the beginning of Microsoft’s push to unseat Google as the search king.

Just as interesting to me, and noted by some other users of Movabletype, my blogging software, are hits in the referral log from sites that aren’t referring readers to me! Though&#185 http://paris-hilt0n-video.blogspot.com, http://www.hummer.c0m, http://blog.j0hnkerry.com, http://outd0orsbest.zeroforum.com/zerouser are listed as having sent browsers this way, searching those sites shows no reference to me at all.

This ploy, and ‘comment spam,’ are new and insidious methods for trying to game the system by having your link land on lots of blogs, using their ‘good name’ with the search engines to elevate yours. I can’t believe I’m the only one looking. What else do people see?

&#185 – To prevent these folks from profiting again, I’ve replaced one letter in each URL with the number “0”.