Search Engine Website Metrics

How to Count Page Views While Ignoring Search Engines: A Clear Guide

When running a website, it’s crucial to understand how often your pages are being viewed. This data not only helps gauge the popularity of your content but can also guide future decisions regarding your site’s development and marketing strategies. However, if your view counter is including visits from search engine bots, the numbers can be misleading and bloated. This blog post explores effective methods to accurately count page views while ignoring search engine traffic.

The Problem: Inflated View Counts

Many website owners find themselves struggling with inflated view counts resulting from search engine crawlers and bots. For instance, if your site logs a “hit” every time a page is loaded, that includes visits from Googlebot or Bingbot, which can significantly skew your data. This leads to:

  • Misleading insights about your audience engagement.
  • Difficulty in determining the true performance of your content.
  • Challenges in measuring the success of your marketing strategies.

The Solution: Effective Tracking Techniques

Here are several methods to accurately log page views while excluding search engine visits:

1. Use AJAX for Dynamic Tracking

One way to mitigate the influence of search engines is to count views through an AJAX call once the page has fully loaded. Here’s how it works:

  • Crawlers vs. AJAX: Search engines typically do not execute JavaScript, which means they will not trigger these AJAX calls.
  • Implementation: As the user loads your page, you can make an AJAX request to log the page view without the bots counting it.

2. Utilize CSS or JavaScript Files

Another effective approach involves incorporating an empty CSS or JavaScript file within your page that logs the request. Here is a quick implementation guide:

  • Include in HTML Head: 
    <link href="empty.css?log=example.html" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
  • Server-Side Logging: Your server should be set to log requests to this CSS file, ensuring it tallies views without counting bots.
  • Return an Empty File: Keep the returned file empty to prevent affecting page design or layout.

3. Filter Based on User Agents

User agents are identifiers sent by web browsers or bots that specify the type of client making the request. You can create logic on your server that screens these user agents:

  • Create a List of Bots: Use resources like User Agents to identify common search engine bots.
  • Filter Requests: Reject logging from those user agents while allowing requests from known browsers.

4. Leverage Analytics Tools

For those who prefer a simpler approach, various analytics tools already provide mechanisms to filter bot traffic:

  • Use AWStats: This log analysis software automatically excludes bots and gives you insights based on actual user activity.
  • Utilize Google Analytics: This powerful tool also helps in distinguishing between bot and human traffic, providing a comprehensive overview.

Conclusion

Accurately counting page views is essential for understanding your website’s performance. By utilizing AJAX calls, filtering based on user agents, or leveraging existing analytics tools, you can effectively track user activity while effectively ignoring bot traffic. This will give you a clearer picture of your audience’s engagement, allowing better decision-making.

With these techniques, you can ensure that your data is relatively clean and reflects only actual user interactions.

Implement these strategies on your site, and you’ll find that your view counts become a more reliable metric for assessing your content’s performance.