Who Are These Random Visitors to My Profile?

You may not realize it, but your profile is actually being visited dozens of times more than you think – by robots. Yep, search engine robots from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and countless other search engines. It’s how they find new webpages and “index” them (add them to their search results).

We actively maintain a list of these bots and ignore them, so that they never actually show up as a visitor to your profile. However, it is an ongoing battle to constantly update our list, and occasionally bot will come through undetected.

If that happens to you, you might see “visitors” coming in from places like Russia, where a lot of bot activity originates. Most of the time, as you probably guessed, those probably aren’t real people.

What can you do to stop it?

• If you see a visitor that looks suspiciously like a bot, let us know and we’ll add it to our growing list of bots to block.
• If you’re getting frustrated by email alerts about bot profile visitors, go to your email settings and turn your Profile Visitor Alerts off (see screenshot).