Googlebot accounts for one fourth of my page hits!
I just had a look at the browser stats for the visits to my site. The results are strange. Googlebot seems to be taking up a huge share of the traffic. I think I have read an explanation somewhere, maybe it was on Tim Bray’s site. Nevertheless, these numbers are scary:
| Browser | count | percentage |
| MSIE | 7890 | 34.8 |
| Googlebot | 5631 | 24.8 |
| Firefox | 1956 | 8.6 |
| undisclosed | 1125 | 5.0 |
| Yahoo | 994 | 4.4 |
| Bloglines | 929 | 4.1 |
| msn | 860 | 3.8 |
| Mozilla | 758 | 3.3 |
| Konqueror | 409 | 1.8 |
| 353 | 1.6 | |
| Safari | 263 | 1.2 |
(The second Google is not Googlebot. The stats are for 24 hours. They exclude some parts of my web site.)
It seems that a large fraction of the visits to my sites are from search engines. What does this says about the current state of the web?
Follow me on twitter!
We need more pings!
Actually, use a google sitemap: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
I’m not completely sure, but I think it should relieve the bots from crawling your site when nothing changes.
P.S.: I couldn’t see the captcha (and didn’t notice before writing my comment). But before I pressed the button to get a new ID, I was wise enough to copy my comment. Pressing new ID clears the whole form. Also, it’s not very friendly to people with diminished vision. I generally discourage the use of image captchas. And this one seems like it’s oursourced, it should at least provide an audio clue. Oh well…
Comment by Robin — 13/1/2006 @ 23:40
I just tested it, and at least under Konqueror, the “new ID” button doesn’t clear the form. I suspect that this is a browser-specific issue. Hope you aren’t using IE?
I’d like to have an audio clue, but I won’t code it myself. I lack time. Blind people can’t comment on my blog. But they can email me.
I’m all hears if you have better alternatives to prevent spam bots from spamming me!
Comment by Daniel — 14/1/2006 @ 0:54
Hmm, sorry to be distracting you from your topic…
Unfortunately, I don’t a any great tips. Perhaps you can plugin into http://akismet.com/ ?
I’m using Firefox 1.07 (Debian/Sarge flavour). I’ve not used IE since version 4.0 or something - did it get any better?
Comment by Robin — 14/1/2006 @ 7:47
I just tested it with Firefox 1.5 under Linux and pressing new ID doesn’t reset the form.
Thanks for the great link!
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 14/1/2006 @ 8:50
http://www.petitiononline.com/captcha/ ? Maybe that will convince Google to share it’s own service.
Comment by Robin — 17/1/2006 @ 4:15
Well, this petition doesn’t ask google to share this service. I think that’s a lot to ask.
What is needed is an easy to install, widely supported, accessible reverse Turing test for wordpress.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 17/1/2006 @ 8:12