Blog viewership data skewed

            Page views that have come through a referrer spam site are skewing statistics of the Chi City Justice blog. Since the blog was launched in September, it has steadily increased in web traffic but recently has come under the attack of spam bot websites.

            Most of the blog’s traffic is being referred through the website www.vampirestat.com, according to google's statistic keeper. Vampirestat is an online web domain statistics and appraisal service that tracks and collects data about a website’s statistics, according to Vampirestat. Owners of websites can look up statistics about their sites on the Vampirestat homepage.

            The most views in a single day for Chi City Justice came on Halloween when 94 visitors visited the page, most from www.vampirestat.com. Those numbers helped October become the busiest month for traffic since the blog went live early September; the total number for the month was 177 views. This also brought up all time page views to almost 300.

            But, a Google search of www.vampirestat.com reveals that the website acts as a spam bot.  A few other bloggers who have experienced similar jumps in viewership say that the page views should not be counted into the blog’s statistics in online forum conversations.

            An email sent to the website was not returned in time for this article’s publication.

            Despite viewership spam, some of the website’s traffic statistics remain unaffected and give an idea on what the blog’s readers enjoy.

            The blog’s most popular post has been the article “Son of inmate in exoneration case losing faith in the courts.” This article has 15 individual page views and was once commented on. The comment author removed the comment before the blog creator could read it.

            People also viewed the articles “Nonprofit encounters challenges assisting former inmates” and “Trial causes drama at criminal courthouse.” Those articles have eight and seven views each.

            Forty eight percent of the blog’s traffic is coming from computers using Microsoft Windows operating systems. But only 12 percent of the blog’s traffic uses the Windows-only browser Internet Explorer. The majority of viewers use the Firefox web browser to view the page.

            Almost all of the page’s views come from computer systems in the United States. Viewers from the Ukraine and Russia have also visited the blog a few times each.