NOT Big in France, After All

I'd imagined an absurd scenario: a French horticultural college, the English lessons, (I don't think they'd bother, but stay with me), used this blog as materials. We teachers do that sort of thing, and it made a kind of sense, it's horticultural and it's written by an English teacher so it's reasonably well punctuated, at least.

Balderdash, of course. Google analytics show that it's actually mostly viewed, as you'd expect, from the UK and USA. Hardly anyone in France even gives a shit about it. It's all some kind of click-bait. A bot, nominally based in France, keeps pinging the blog with apparent page views. The idea, apparently, is for the curious blogger to wonder where the traffic is coming from, and click on the source; (I'm glad to say I'd worked it out before I did that.

But I have noticed this. The posts which gets 1000s of hits from the bot all have 2 or 1 word headings. Botanical names in headings are the bots particular favourites. A heading with 3 or more words, will get a few dozen hits, which are probably genuine.

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