Why so many website hits from China?

[Graham Mitchell]

This has been a growing trend over the past year. Now my website has more visitors from China than all other countries in the world combined (according to Awstats) and I don't even have a Chinese language option.

Any idea what's going on?

[opgr]

Most likely robots. (search engines).

Edit: a bit quick on the draw, other options are:
- your server could have been infected/zombified,
- you have a lot of mentions of high-profile, high-quality western brands on your site, which could generate a lot of hits.

[Craig Lamson]

This has been a growing trend over the past year. Now my website has more visitors from China than all other countries in the world combined (according to Awstats) and I don't even have a Chinese language option.

Any idea what's going on?

My website gets a ton of hits from Russia.  For no reason I can find.  Even checked with my host, Inmotion and they said there was no problem they could find.

I banned and banned IP's and new ones just keep coming....

[AndreG]

Hi,
I had a very serious problem with spiders particularly « Baiduspider » to the point where I had to pay my provider a whole lot more for the bandwidth usage. robots.txt files did not help. I had to change my files names and add a password to filter them out. It solved the problem. It dropped from 16000 to 50000 visits a day to the real usage.

Yes, It was drastic. I had to balance site costs versus presence on the web.

 

[Justan]

My website gets a ton of hits from Russia.  For no reason I can find.  Even checked with my host, Inmotion and they said there was no problem they could find.

I banned and banned IP's and new ones just keep coming....

One of my sites has been getting a lot of hits from Russia and the Ukraine off and on for the last 5 months or so. One month there will be lots of hits and none the next. I checked and some of the sites have my site’s name in their meta text (keywords and elsewhere). I have no idea why. My site hasn’t been hacked, which is what I expected to find.

[Graham Mitchell]

Most likely robots. (search engines).

Edit: a bit quick on the draw, other options are:
- your server could have been infected/zombified,
- you have a lot of mentions of high-profile, high-quality western brands on your site, which could generate a lot of hits.

It's not the server - I changed web hosts recently and the pattern continued uninterrupted.

As for the brands, I don't really have such keywords on my site.

In the referrer logs there are no Chinese pages either.

Very strange.

[RobSaecker]

On my website, excluding search engines, 100% of the hits from China and Russia have been malicious; either attempted comment spam or attempted hacks. And as AndreG noted, even the search engines can be problematic. Obviously this is not going to be true for everyone, but in my case I have a couple Russian ISPs completely blocked from accessing the site, and large portions of China as well.

A couple suggestions:

1) Look at your access logs, not just the summary provided by Awstats or the like. There are differences between real browsers and spam or hack bots that are readily apparent, once you're familiar with them. Also pay attention to referrers and browers ID strings, as those can both be used to identify bad access attempts.

2) Consider using something like Project Honeypot <projecthoneypot.org> to automatically block bad actors. There are addons to use with most common blogging software.

If anyone wants more specific suggestions, please ask.

[Graham Mitchell]

Thanks but that is probably overkill for me. At the moment it is not causing any problems other than polluting my visitor data

[gerafotografija]

Considering what you describe, and the hijacking of DNS services in Europe by the RPC a while back, I wonder if they could be rerouting some subset of internet traffic through their servers along with the recent change to requiring internet services to only be provided to people with their real names reported.

NYT keeps a feed going dedicated to the general topic here http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/internet_censorship/index.html

I ran my own server at home for a while (totally free Ubuntu UNIX setup on an old dilapidated Dell laptop), and found the folks in Beijing were just ahead of the ones in Virginia coming to check out my newly registered domain name. Since the IP address was dynamically generated and changed from from time to time, that did not have much to do with it.

After the Russians made a visit, the amount of spam started picking up drastically. Aksimet from Wordpress was a savior, and I can't recommend both Ubuntu (server version) and Wordpress enough. Great tools for learned how to DIY an internet presence.

In the end I switched to free hosting and serving from Wordpress.com and Redbubble for my blog and photos. This was mainly done to avoid needing to keep an eye on updates and bandwidth all the time. It is still not costing me anything up-front, but does occaisionally involve a pushed ad on my pages.