Rodolfo6 - 3:49 pm on Jul 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have a question regarding traffic of spiders and I need some opinions or suggestions:

There is a free pdf-download on a website. There are 8 detailed weekly traffic logs showing hits from search engine spiders and hits of downloads. There are 21 weekly traffic logs showing only the total number of hits to the file (without sub totals of hits from spiders or downloads) and I must calculate/estimate the number of hits of actual downloads during these 21 weeks.
What is the best approach:

1) Based on the 8 weeks detailed traffic logs, calculate a weekly average of hits from spiders and use this weekly average to calculate the actual downloads during the 21 weeks (total hits - spider hits = downloads).
This approach is based on the assumption that the frequency of visits from search engine spiders is pre-scheduled by the search engine, is a roughly consistent average, and is not dependent on - or related to - other traffic/hits to the pdf-file.
or
2) Based on the 8 weeks detailed traffic logs, calculate a percentage (%) of the hits from spiders (in relation to total hits) and use this percentage (%) to calculate the actual downloads during the 21 weeks (total hits - % = downloads). This approach is based on the assumption that the frequency of visits from search engine spiders is related to and dependent on other traffic to the pdf-file and can be expressed as a percentage from the total number of traffic/hits to the file.

I would appreciate any suggestions or comments for finding the most appropriate and correct approach for calculating the downloads for the 21 weeks.

Thanks

Rodolfo