Analytics is based on JavaScript embedded in a web site’s web page… This Javascript is ran by a client browser. AND the client browser reports back to google of the site it is looking at. Don’t get me wrong Analytics is a very nice tool. I use it myself. BUT I don’t leave all my eggs in one basket either…

ALL traffic like spiders/BOTs and spammers,  will not show up on Analytics…. They do not run the Javascript that Analytics relies on. And rightfully so. Analytics is meant to measure user traffic like normal [people] peeps like us… Not to report on NON normal web serfing..

Webalizer monitors all traffic. If an image is downloaded or a file downloaded, right down to the little spider crawling the website.  This information is very useful for system administrators. Not so useful for content developers..

Also keep in mind you want to make sure the JavaScript for analytics is on ALL pages of your site. The header or footer is a great place to start. Warning, sometimes in Wordpress themes the “Header” or “footer” that you have the code in, may not traverse across your whole site. It depends on the theme that you are using and how they wrote it…

So if I may… let’s take a web page. Web pages have s a background image, a banner image, maybe a footer image, and maybe even a sidebar image… In Analytics that would be ONE page hit. However, in Webalizer, that could show up as 4 to 6 hits..  Why the extra hits? If you have advertising on your site like Adsense, you will get a return hit for scanning the page that the ad is on when a user so nicely clicks on those links. 

So Analytics see 400 visitors, And let’s say 4 images etc. per page so that’s 1600  hits seen by Webalizer.. Then you have the spiders and BOTs.. I can tell you that can often be double your visitors… And they will index all your pages… And again and again.. Don’t forget about your RSS feeds, trackbacks etc.

You may want to take a look at your sitemap and reduce the amount of spiders on your site if it seems like they are scanning all the time… Personally, I say let them crawl my site… That’s how we get found by REAL people.. But there are spiders out there that are of no use but use up bandwidth.. You can try updating your robot.txt But chances are that the spider is “bad” and will ignore the file. You can then also limit the spider by blocking it’s IP.. Those darn things just keep on moving around and get new addresses…

Or you can just sit back, and as long as your real visitors are not getting affected, let those virtual pests crawl all they want.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under Internet, Webmaster.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.