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
Google 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?

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

6 thoughts on “Googlebot accounts for one fourth of my page hits!”

  1. 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…

    Reply

  2. 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!

    Reply

  3. 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? 😉

    Reply

  6. 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.

    Reply

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