My little old homepage that I built back in 1998, using Notepad for my html-editor, is still out there. Largely unchanged, for sentimental reasons. I added two sub-domains, though, for practice on newer web design techniques like HTML5 and WordPress.

Most webmasters have one main goal: get traffic. Organic traffic is considered the “best”, but many web pages also rely on marketing, SEO tactics, social media and search engine ads – all just to attract traffic. Any kind of traffic, or hopefully even targeted traffic?

In the beginning I was thrilled when I saw that somebody, anybody, had actually “visited” my little corner of the web. I “optimized” my page, I put links to it out on every place I had access to, I submitted my URL to search engines. I wanted to be “seen”. It worked, sort of. My website statistics showed growing numbers of visitors. Over the last twenty years I went from an average of 3 views per week to a staggering 83 per day.

That’s good, right?

Well, lately, I’ve been thinking – maybe not? I looked at my statistics in more detail. Where do my visitors come from? I found out, that there are very few “real” visitors. Most of my website hits come from Russia, China, Ukraine, and other places where I really can’t see my little old personal webpage being of any valid use to anybody.

This has got to stop!

So I educated myself on the options. Then I took action. I renamed pages and folders on my webpage to break any links that somebody might have stored somewhere. Then I edited my .htaccess to deny access from certain specific countries. I also deleted the sitemap, and edited the robots.txt file to exclude certain bots from crawling my site.

Then I waited…… it worked! Traffic is back down to about 5 daily hits. Real visitors who actually spend time on my page.

Life is good 🙂