We use anonymous cookies to identify unique visitors to our sites and
determine things like requests/visitor, etc. It's not perfect but it works
pretty well, as long as your time-scale is short enough that you can make
insignificant the probability that many users have lost/deleted their
cookies. It's lots better than any other way to count visits/visitors.
I'm increasingly worried about how robots/crawlers handle cookies. I
imagine most of them reject cookies, which is fine. Lots of them probably
accept cookies in order to index registration-required sites. Those are
fine, too (since they make so many requests they're easy to exclude). What
we're worried about is whether maybe some of them first accept and then
delete their cookies, so they appear to be different users each time they
make a request or with each visit.
That sounds dumb, and I can't think of any reason they would do that, but I
also can't find anything that says they don't. The thing is, our traffic
has increased a lot lately, and we can't attribute it to advertising or
anything sensible. With all the new shopping-bots out there, and probably
hundreds or of data-mining companies with their own secretive web-bots, I
wonder if we're just getting lots of them pretending to be humans using
navigator or IE.
Anybody have any suggestions for an easy way to sort this out? Or pointers
to any info to check out?
Thanks,
Matt Morgan
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