Robin <mixent...@aussiebroadband.com.au> wrote:
> >I exclude robot readers after identifying them by various methods. > > Why would you exclude them? Surely allowing access would ensure that > people doing searches would be more likely to find > the site? > Perhaps I should make it clear I am not actually excluding anyone. That is, blocking anyone. I just mean I am not counting their downloads in the totals I show at LENR-CANR.org. When you see a website or some PR person describing how many "visits" or "downloads" there are to a website, you should bear in mind those numbers are an approximation. The number of visits and "unique visitors" in particular varies a great deal depending on what you define as a visit. Log file records are poorly defined and the format is obsolete, so it is difficult to sort out what is actually happening at a website. Utility programs such as Weblog Expert and Awstats estimate vastly different numbers of "visitors." I think I have seen them vary by a factor of 4.
