A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Man

Annika Albrite, doing some brown eye winking at people in her own very special way.

Image source: A reverse image search reveals that this GIF has been on EVERY LAST ADULT SITE ON THE INTERWEBS. I'm not kidding, Google reverse image search alone turned up dozens of hits. If it's a porn aggregator site, it has this video is on it, and if it's not, it means that aggregator has failed to exercise due diligence! So I was unable to find even a hint of a source video for this, though I am sure there is one.

My title is appropriate to the pic, but it's also appropriate as a meta comment about this blog. Since I started regularly updating the blog after years of neglect, I was very pleased to see my Google stats jump from less than 100 hits a day to thousands of hits a day. For example I had just over 5000 hits yesterday and so far today the blog is at just over 2000 hits. 

But there were absolutely no other signs of engagement on the blog, no comments, no nothing but the Google hits. It made me wonder how many of my hits were coming from bots and scrapers. So I activated Google Analytics which could eliminate bot and scraper hits. I let it collect data for a couple of days then checked the results.

The results were Not Good. The Google Analytics showed eight or so users, sometimes as many as a dozen in a day sometimes as few as six. That was for a day when I had over 3000 hits according to Google stats. I asked ChatGPT to account for the discrepancy, and it said it was not uncommon for some blogs to get 98 percent of their hits from bots and scrapers. And that my percentage was 98.3 percent, which was right on the money. So basically, me and just a few die-hards here.

But wait, it gets worse! I asked ChatGPT if the issue could be that my personal hits could be part of the "Users" as I added new posts and updated older ones. And ChatGPT said "Yes" if I hadn't told ChatGPT not to log my own hits as a User. And of course, I have not. So I did that yesterday, I turned off logging my visits to the blog for Google Analytics. 

Today I checked the log and, with Google stats reporting over 2000 hits today, Google Analytics was reporting 0 users here. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. I have been talking to myself, or rather, to bots and scrapers alone. My nods and winks were being sent to thousands of blind men.

Well, that does bear thinking about.