Google Accelerator messing up my visitor reports?

[TheVampire]

Good Day,

Last week, my website which usually gets aprox 30 visitors per day, all of a sudden jumped to hundreds (the counts are from the free Urchin visitor reports that I get w/ earthlink). The actual pageviews are still down around 30 - 40 per day. This does however, throw off the calculations Urchin uses for the amount of time each visitor spends looking at the site (which I am very interested in) so that they all show as 0 seconds now.

This activity seemed to coincide with the appearance of google's new accelerator feature, which fetches all of the links on a page when a user visits it. I have several inbound links, so I'm wondering if this is what's happening. The free version of Urchin does not give me the information about where the traffic is coming from, so I'm not sure.

Is there any html that I can put on my page that tells Google to bugger off and not pre-fetch my page?

If it's not this, then what might it be?

Thanks,

Robert

 

[BabyJeffy]

There isn't any HTML you can use to do this. If you are running something serverside then you can:

"It might be worth returning a 403 when the HTTP_X_MOZ is set to 'prefetch' header is sent."

Here is a really cool article I read that gives a good description of some of the other problems this prefetching can cause to web developers (this is where the quote above comes from):

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archiv...ot_so_fast_an_alert_for_web_app_designers.php

And from that, a great link to the Moz site where they have more formal documentation:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefetching_FAQ.html

BTW - the referrer is set correctly so Urchin ought to work fine when "drilling down referrer information".

Regards,
Jeff

 

[coldfused]

That is absolutely insane. Prefetching is going to delete records from my database?

I read the mozilla stuff but it doesnt explain much.

Where and how do I put the appropriate code to stop this from happening to my admin pages?

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[BabyJeffy]

Prefetching will delete records from your database if the user has the ability to delete records through use of a URL that is either a <link> or an <a href>.

This will be prefetched (javascript will be ignored here):

<a href="delete.php" onclick="return(confirm('Sure?'))">XX</a>

This will not be prefetched since javascript is disabled:

<a href="#" onclick="if (confirm('Sure?')) document.location='delete.php'">YY</a>

The articles touch on lots of ideas... and many of them are valid solutions as well.

The over-all "stop prefetching completely" solution requires you use a server-side solution. You send a header to the browser if you detect it is prefetching... and it stops prefetching that page. You can only send headers before any other output has been sent... so this cuts down bandwidth too.

There are many tutorials and examples on h ow to send headers using PHP, ASP and JSP on TekTips.

Jeff