How to stop America On Line from visiting my site?

[gm10]

For some reasons every click from AOL visitors shows in Statcounter "visitor path" as a separate visit. It screws up statistics like bounce rate, time on the site, etc. Is there a way to stop AOL from sending visitors to my site?

Thanks in advance for the help.

gm

[cgrantski]

Well, you could compromise by allowing the people who use AOL as their service provider to come to your site, but fix your stats by using a temporary cookie to keep the various hits in the same visit.

I'm curious as to why you want to keep people out of your site for the sake of how the statistics look?

[gm10]

>Well, you could compromise by allowing the people who use AOL as their service provider to come to your site,
>but fix your stats by using a temporary cookie to keep the various hits in the same visit.

>I'm curious as to why you want to keep people out of your site for the sake of how the statistics look?

Nothing personal. Strictly business. :)

The site belongs to a local business located in Toronto, Canada. AOL is not popular here, and the business won't loose any potential customers. OTOS, I also use Google's Analytics. Google shows bounce rate in its statistics. So, it is important and may affect the site position in SERP.

[Yoshimi]

But you said the aol visits were messing with your statcounter data, not your Google data? GA isn't going to look at your SC data for bounce info, and if AOL is messing with GA data G will know about it, so even if they were taking bounce rate into account for organic SERPS (which I don't bellieve they are currently) they would be doing so in such a way as to compensate for the iffy AOL stats.

It seems to me that you could be cutting off your nose to spite your face based on some very unlikely assumptions, and even if only 2% of your traffic comes through AOL, I can't see how it makes good business sense to reduce potential sales.

[gm10]

>compensate for the iffy AOL stats

I hope Google can what statcounter can't. :) OK, for now AOL get's reprieve.

>I can't see how it makes good business sense to reduce potential sales.

The site is for a local business. AOL visitors come from out of the country. Cutting off AOL would not hurt the business at all. As I've said - nothing personal. :) By the way, it totally escapes me why would anyone use AOL on the first place, but this is a completely different topic. :)

[cgrantski]

Canadians are not or cannot be AOL subscribers? Is that true?

[tangor]

The quick answer to banning AOL is to use .htaccess, Order Allow,Deny, and ban them. You'll find many examples of how to do this on Webmasterworld. Every site owner has the right to determine who comes to play on their website, but they also have to learn how to do it.

[gm10]

>Canadians are not or cannot be AOL subscribers? Is that true?

I remember around Y2K AOL was bombarding me with their diskettes. I don't think it ever took off in Canada. Internet savvy people don't need AOL. Not savvy ones get herded to Yahoo and MSN by their local ISP providers.

[gm10]

>The quick answer to banning AOL is to use .htaccess, Order Allow,Deny, and ban them. You'll find many
>examples of how to do this on Webmasterworld.

Thank you for the hint.

>Every site owner has the right to determine who comes to play on their website, but they also have to learn
>how to do it.

:)

[Yoshimi]

Internet savvy people don't need AOL.

Fortunately customers don't need to be internet savvy in order to buy online, otherwise most of us would be out of business. And as AOL canada still exists, there must be some people left out there still using it.

My parents for instance (in the UK) have been using AOL since 1996, when we first got internet access, my dad is PC and internet savvy, but sees no benefit from moving away from AOL. They like that my brother has his own log in (no one would want to see his browsing history) they can access everything they want to access, everyone they email knows their addresses, so can get hold of them when they want to and they have had no service problems. They even still use the AOL browser (although I did install FF when I was there last as it made me want to tear my hair out)

It works for them, and who am I to argue with that...They also have a large disposable income, and I kind of pity the site that misses out on a sale from them when they are in the mood to spend money, just because their ISP messed up the sites stats ;)