Wordpress small blog and access from Russia

[cfmtravel]

Hi guys
I've recently started a small Wordpress blog about traveling with some advice, pics, monument description and stuff like that. Checking my Stats program (Awstats) I realized that there are traffic coming from web sites from Russia and Ukraine (plus a bunch of weird sites). Not to mention the curious fact that among the top countries I have China.

The question is what is going on?
What those web sites are trying to achieve?
Clearly must be something related to spam or attempt to hack but I would like to know what is happening.

As you can imagine I am a newbie :)

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, cfmtravel!


do those referrals look like human traffic?
for example are they downloading favicon and all the images and css?

[cfmtravel]

Thanks for the reply, I'm not sure how I can check if they look like human traffic. AwStats divides the viewed traffic and not viewed trafic I though it would be enough.

AwStats report the pages as "Links from an external page".
Any idea how can I analize the situation?

thanks

[phranque]

server access log files

[incrediBILL]

The simplest solution, unless you run an international blog, is to block Russia, China and the Ukraine which are the world leaders in scraping, spam, hacking and botnets.

On one server I have China in my server firewall, I call it the "Great Firewall of China" as it was easier that way than sweating over the daily reports that 100s of IPs were hacking at my SSH root access.

[cfmtravel]

Unfortunately the blog is international so I cannot block any country.

About reading the server access log files I have to admit I'm not familiar
Do you have any advice?

thanks