Crawler, googlebot

[dwo]

Hello,

yesterday, I let index my gallery with 5 crawler to produce a sitemap.xml.

Now I am interested, if the numbers "pics most viewed" in CPM can be changed through such crawler, especially crawler from search engines?

e.g.: when googlebot crawls my gallery and finds a jpg, does this mean that the "number pics most viewed" goes automatically up +1, too ?

Or ist this impossible due to programming this feature?

Thank You, Dietmar

[Joachim Müller]

The webserver can't make a difference between a human browsing your page and a spider crawling it. Therefor, the hits count increases both on hits generated by human surfers as well as spiders.
The only things a spider can not / will not do:

• Fill in or submit forms
• Follow JavaScript-links
• Follow links that he's forbidden to follow by your robots.txt file
• Follow links with the nofollow attribute (<a href="foobar/" rel="nofollow">

[dwo]

Thank you.

Now I know why there are 100 more hits on every pic since yesterday.

But I think this is no problem. Statistically insignifikant, because even distribution across all pics. ;-)

[bïöµï¢]

Follow links that he's forbidden to follow by your robots.txt file

That's talking about legitimate bots .. but if your bandwith is also getting wasted, then perhaps someone is 'ripping' your site with programs like Black Widow, Offline Explorer or something else may be going on .. There are ways you can (on *nix, Linux hosting) use your .htaccess file to (for example) ban IP addresses that access a (hidden) directory that you specify is NOT to be visited in your robots.txt file - pretty cool stuff

[Joachim Müller]

Sure, above recommendations only apply for valid bots, not for tricksters. However, banning by IP address won't help against leechers.