Now I know where the official site gets its inflated hits from

Discussion in 'Bulletin Board ARCHIVE' started by Farnham_Red, Jul 3, 2006.

  1. Farnham_Red

    Farnham_Red Administrator Staff Member Admin

    Joined:
    Jul 18, 2005
    Messages:
    34,488
    Likes Received:
    23,928
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Farnham
    Style:
    Barnsley
    The number of visits recorded at some popular Web sites may be inflated by a little-known Google prediliction to pre-load pages that it guesses the user will choose from the results listed. If Google's prediction is accurate, the page is presented in a fraction of the usual time. But a site visit is clocked up, even if the user chooses to look elsewhere. Site owners who want to avoid these ghost in the machine page views that inflate their Web stats - or cost them money if they pay-per-byte for bandwidth - can block prefetch visits from Google and others by having their Web server return a 404 or 405 (method not allowed) HTTP response code for all such page requests.

    more details on
    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefetching_FAQ.html
     
    Farnham_Red, Jul 3, 2006
    #1
  2. EastStander

    EastStander Active Member

    Joined:
    Jul 17, 2005
    Messages:
    29,883
    Likes Received:
    24
    Trophy Points:
    38
    Location:
    Upper tier, Gangway 11
    Home Page:
    Style:
    Barnsley (full width)
    So if someone does a search on "Barnsley" because they are looking for info on the town, one of the results would be the official site and it would load that behind the scenes but the user may click on summat else.

    Also - what constitutes a "hit" on the official site? It might be going on the home page in which case you could already be on there and generate a number of hits.
     
    EastStander, Jul 3, 2006
    #2
  3. Gue

    Guest Guest

    Well spotted. I didn't know about this. Explains a lot about some sites.
     
    Guest, Jul 3, 2006
    #3

Share This Page