Number of hits divided by "robot hits"

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?

dos-man

In article <e4bc58ab.0403030928.116953d3 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>,
ChairShot (AT) mail (DOT) com (Dos-Man) wrote:

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

What is a hit counter? Or do you mean server logs?

If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?

You have to understand that a 'spider' is the part of the search engine
that indexes your site. It passes by on its own time and takes a look
around. When a web user attempts a search at the search engine, the SE's
website presents relevant results taken from the database that the
spider filled earlier. From the SE's website, the web user enters your
site. What often distinguishes the spider from the human visitor, is the
so called User Agent string. A web user's browser also has such a
string, that it sends out with every request for a file from a webserver.

A typical one is for example:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)

Here is a search engine spider's string, from one of my client's stats:
htdig/3.1.6

Applications that analyse the logfiles of your webserver are often able
to show you the User Agent strings of visitors who passed by. Some of
those applications show how many human visitors came from a search
engine's website and sometimes also show what they were looking for.

--
Kris
<kristiaan (AT) xs4all (DOT) netherlands> (nl)
<http://www.cinnamon.nl/>

Dos-Man wrote:

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

That depends on the programming of the robot and the techniques used to
implement the counter.

If so, how do you determine how many hits were actual people?

Track the user agent header and cope with bots that pretend to be browsers
and browsers which pretend to be "Waz up, big large?". Hit counters aren't
really reliable anyway, the Internet has these things called 'caches'.

--
David Dorward <http://dorward.me.uk/>

ChairShot (AT) mail (DOT) com (Dos-Man) wrote:

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

Depends how your hit counter works.
Robots obviously contribute entries to your server log files.

If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?

Filter known robots out when you analyse your log files.

Steve

--
"My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you,
I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor

Steve Pugh <steve (AT) pugh (DOT) net> <http://steve.pugh.net/>

On 3 Mar 2004 09:28:14 -0800, ChairShot (AT) mail (DOT) com (Dos-Man) wrote:

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

Depends. Many hit counters work by serving an image (and counting how
often it does so). Many spiders ignore images and don't download them.

If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?

You don't care. There aren't that many spiders - if they're a
significant proportion of the total, then your volume is small anyway.

"Dos-Man" <ChairShot (AT) mail (DOT) com> wrote

Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?

If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?

You got some good replies to your question... but I was going to add:

It really doesn't matter. If this is a serious concern (if hits are
bots/spiders or people) of yours then your site must have absolutely no
traffic and you should worry about that instead spending even one second
worrying if a hit is a real person or a bot