Web spiders inflating view counts

dugan · 09-15-2011, 10:45 AM

I would imagine that search engine bots probably contribute quite heavily to a thread's view count.

Why don't you set things up so that obvious spiders (such as those with "Googlebot in their user-agent) can't increase a thread's view count?

XavierP · 09-15-2011, 02:05 PM

AFAIK, spiders do not affect a thread's count. Jeremy can give a definitive answer on this though.

frankbell · 09-15-2011, 08:44 PM

To build on XavierP's post, the stats programs that I have used on my website know how to differentiate spiders out of the box.

Having seen spider counts on my own little backwater website, logging spiders would add not hundreds but thousands of hits per thread per day. A typical log count would be, say, 434 unique visitors, 1,132 page views, and 18,056 spider hits for a day.

jeremy · 09-16-2011, 09:21 AM

For performance reasons the thread views logic is extremely simple (and not real-time). Looking at the numbers, it does not appear that search engines are inflating views by a statistically significant enough number to necessitate changing that logic. Out of curiosity, is the number of views a thread has received a number members put a lot of credence into?

--jeremy

dugan · 09-16-2011, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Out of curiosity, is the number of views a thread has received a number members put a lot of credence into?

The number of members who do is at least one.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4405078

druuna · 09-16-2011, 11:06 AM

Hi Jeremy,

Quote:

Out of curiosity, is the number of views a thread has received a number members put a lot of credence into?

Not really. I sometimes glance at it without putting too much importance on it. I see it as a nicety, nothing more and nothing less.

frankbell · 09-16-2011, 09:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeremy

Out of curiosity, is the number of views a thread has received a number members put a lot of credence into?

I tend to notice it only when a zero-reply thread has been around for a couple of days or more (If it is high, it tells me that the question is definitely not routine and that answering it is not easy) or when it hits four digits, like the MLB thread (Go Phillies).