Fudging the numbers

[babblefish1960]

We now have no idea how many "people" are actually on the website any longer.

Quote from darkdep "the club and forum have exploded with new people this year; hell our top "number of people on the forum at one time" stat went from something like 67 to 130 last month.  That's ONE HUNDRED THIRTY PEOPLE all reading OVAS at the same moment." unquote.

This is inaccurate, the spiders are now being counted, and as they are mere search engines cataloguing, we no longer have a clue how many unique people are visiting the website. Our last reasonable number of maximum visitors is still 85 souls on February 27 2007, and the only way it can be usurped as a number would be to lose the spider count.

This has only resulted in puffing up our numbers falsely and making the statistics nigh useless in presenting information for other purposes where accurate statistics are needed.

Though it is an interesting fact that we can now see the spiders, is it possible to have their number not included in our accumulation of statistics to unnaturally inflate our actual body count.

[BigDaddy]

I am pretty sure the previous versions of the forum software also registered spiders as "guests".  Any type of access to a specific page gets registered either as a user or a guest, its just that the latest version now allows one to differentate between a true guest (a human being surfing without a registered account) and a search engine cataloging information.

As to parsing out the spiders from the guests.. I'll leave that up to the APW to answer.

[darkdep]

BD is right; the number of 130 does in fact represent a large increase over our February record.  We can now split that up and see where it's coming from but that ability doesn't change the total (we always counted spiders).

The thing is, there are usually a few spiders hitting the site at any one moment but I wouldn't think they would increase in number drastically.  Yes, 130 includes some spiders; but it also includes people coming in as guests from Google and Yahoo.  Those Spiders are doing us good.

Every stat is a little fuzzy.

[babblefish1960]

So as it has been explained, we still have everything the same as it was, we just can now differentiate between spider engines and lurking cruisers, I see that.

Okay, the next thing I would ask then, we (we being you) have not installed any new code to attract engines, things are still the same as before, we are just being seen more because of actual growth?

That is interesting, as the growth went kablooey overnight.

[BigDaddy]

Yes, as the ammount of content on the site grows, so too does the amount of search engine traffic.

Google assigns a number to a webpage,  this is the "PR number" (or PageRank).  Currently our page rank is 4.  The maximum is 10 (sites like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc.. have 10 PR).  In the grand scheme of things this is a respectable ranking.

The higher your ranking, the more spiders are likely to be indexing your content.

Now, Yahoo seems to be going a little overboard with their spiders, likely in an attempt to try to match the indexing ability of Google.

There's your useless web trivia for the day.

[dan2x38]

Are the sudden increases actually just a representation of the growing popularity of this hobby. Along with the economics growth therefore more ppl can afford the expenses of this hobby? Possibly giving the gift of fish as a Christmas gift? Income tax returns? Guess I am pointing at demographics more then tech trends.

[babblefish1960]

Actually, as the club's website accrues more page views per day, we tend to get noticed more by search engines, which in turn portray OVAS in internet searches more often, which in turn exposes us more to folks who hadn't seen us before, therefore providing more viewers and on it goes. It is a vicious circle that for once is a good thing.

[dan2x38]

So would a good question not be why did OVAS' over all popularity increase so quickly? In order for OVAS to get top hits the rating most likely improved. Is that not a legit increase or just a spider power struggle... 

[mseguin]

Mostly its just natural growth for a relatively new website, as well as improvements made by our previouis and current webmasters.

[darkdep]

Bottom line:  We rock.

[dan2x38]

yes... and when spiders refresh indexes there are more hits... more topics... more hits... blah, blah...