Rodolfo6 - 6:25 pm on Aug 3, 2004 (gmt 0)

Thank you wilderness, tedster and dcrombie for your comments and suggestions.

I am aware that it will not be possible to get exact numbers, but I must get the best possible numbers based on a most realistic approach.

The free download (pdf-file) has 262,012 bytes, and hits with this exact file size we consider downloads or human traffic. All other hits we consider hits from spiders. (I was told that pdf-files must be downloaded in one hit with the total file size/bytes, is this correct?)

According to the 8 weeks detailed logs, there were total 456 hits (or 57 hits/week), including 385 hits (48 hits/week) from spiders, and 71 downloads.

The 21 weekly logs (showing only the total of weekly hits), show a dramatic increase of hits, in some weeks up to 10 times (up to 600 hits/week) compared to the 8 weeks detailed logs. Now I have to figure out the total of human traffic or number of free downloads during these 21 weeks.

I cannot see a reason why spider traffic should increase up to 10 times for a time period of 12 weeks and than return to almost normal traffic, and I believe that this increase is not related to spider traffic, but to an increase of human traffic.

I thought that establishing an average of weekly hits from spiders and using this weekly average to calculate the number of downloads during the 21 weeks would be a realistic approach. But I am not sure if this is correct, and I would like to get some other opinions.

Regarding the ratio to browsers as suggested by dcrombie: my logs do not identify browser types.