Sporadic spidering this time

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

In the past month or so, amidst ordinary days in which this most modest of blogs gets 30-50 hits daily, a spike in Russian interest pushes that to 100-150 on a particular day, in the space of a few minutes. Clearly a robot or spider at work. This time, there is a series of sporadic spikes over the past few days:

The lesser spikes on the 27th and 30th are mildly interesting, but the past 24 hours is what caught my eye. And as the lower left pane shows, the interest is spread out over posts from the past several years. Now, the "Audience" pane for the past week isn't quite as clear as the one for the past 24 hours:

I had hit the "More" button next to the map on the screen above, and changed the time to the past day. Now we see that, while the rest of the world slouches along as usual (even a hit from Fiji and one from Japan!), someone in the U.S. and someone in Russia each ran a spider that Hoovered up close to 200 pages in a matter of minutes. Probably one of the big spikes is the U.S. one, and the other is the Russian one.

My wife watched as I assembled this post, something she almost never does. She remarked, "Most of that is just people getting a random hit from a search for something else." My thoughts also. I have no idea why my blog, or any other, would periodically get heavy attention from any one entity...let alone two of them.