When you are tracking your statistics and learning how you are being found, you will run across different user agents and ip addresses accessing your website. Most of the time your stats system is able to determine who a spider is and who a human is. Sometimes however, it shows an actual spider as a guest.

One of the easiest ways to recognize an actual unique visitor is to read tel, com, or other similar agents in the ip source. This tells you that they are using a phone, dsl, or other internet service to access your website. You can google that specific domain to find out for sure that it is an isp.

Another way is to find out what files are being accessed. If it is a public page on your site then it is more likely to be a human than if it were accessing a robots.txt file.

After you get used to stats tracking you will be able to recognize a unique user when you see one. It just takes practice.

Tags: ip addresses, ip source, spider, spiders, stats tracking, unique user, unique visitors
Posted in Stats Tracking |

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Stats Tracking. 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.