Webtrends Filters

List of common filters for WebTrends

[debbya]

Anyone willing to share their webtrends filters (bots, spiders) and other non-visitors?

I would be more than willing to buy you dinner and drinks in Vegas in November!

I'm using WebTrends 7 and I need to filter out the non-visitors. I thought I was filtering out the spiders but the more I look at the logs -- I see that I'm not. I keep adding filters everytime I see one in the "visitors" but not sure they're working.

Also.....not sure if these entries are visitors or not: cache-mtc-ab13.proxy.aol.com_Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Recently added a rss feed and my traffic went from 170,000 to 999,000 -- I know that's wrong. Anyone else have this problem? Is it some sort of pinging?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

[cgrantski]

Here's how I interpret the proxy visitor. AOL caches pages a lot and serves the cached version to its users; i.e. if their browser makes a request for a page, and they're an AOL subscriber, AOL first checks to see if it already has a cached version of the page you're requesting. If so, it shows the visitor that page. If not, it sends the request to your real server.

To do this, AOL seems to be pinging a whole lot of pages all the time to keep its caches up to date. And that's what you've got.

This could be an outdated explanation. I researched it a couple years ago.

And AOL seems to do this mainly for a site's home page.

(It's another good reason to use page tagging, because even a cached version of your page will get tracked. With log files, nobody on AOL who's shown a cached version of a page will get into your logs until they request a non-cached page.)