Since the post frequeny became higher on my blog I was taking more often a look into my stats thus I had to experience a couple of high peaks during the last three weeks. Up to 200 uniqe visitors per day is a normal number but 500 is way too high.
I could explain the first two by posting the shortened URLs of some articles on facebook and twitter but I didn’t blog anything the past few days except the One Word A Day entries so the latest peak is absolutely nonsense. A closer look on the referers breaks the secret. It seems that Baidu, a Chinese search engine, is crawling my blog every fifteen minutes on some days but what for? There’s nothing too interesting stuff for them …
Do they expect pixel-encoded messages in the picture of my pi cake which I baked ten days ago?
Ever tried filtering out crawlers from your statistics?
The statistics software on wordpress.com does that automatically, and it’s really very good. It’s also installable on standalone WordPress sites: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
I was pretty sure my statistics was filtering them in the past but if they’re not using the bot identity as Microsoft recently did they’re counted as a visitor.
The more I think about it the more strange is it. If they’re crawling let me say every 10 minutes, they’re should only be an offset of 144 a day.
Thanks for the link, I’ll give it a try. As I can remember I decided to use another statistics plugin because I had no API key at that time.