Question about website visitors

Lots of visits from outside USA

[grandma genie]

My website is image rich. I sell stuffed animals and plush toys. The images are mine. I check my server logs daily because I was hacked several times before moving to a new host. I am on a shared Apache server. I notice lots of visitors coming to my site. They hit certain sections, then leave. They are all from places like Russia, Romania, China, Vietnam, India. None of these visits result in sales. So, why all these visits? Are they scrapers? Can this damage my position in the search engines? I can block the IPs with htaccess, but should I? Lately I see the referrer is Google images. The page visited is about monkeys. So it appears these visitors see the image in Google, then visit the page. Then leave. It just seems odd they usually bookmark the page before leaving. Is there some way to recognize a scraper? Most regular visitors are obvious because they always put something in the shopping cart to check the shipping rates. These foreign visitors never put anything in the cart. What are they up to?

[lammert]

These are probably regular visitors searching for images about monkeys in Google Image search. One way to stop them is to exclude your images directory in the robots.txt for the Google Image bot, but that may also stop regular visitors and potential clients to your site who use image search to find your products.

These foreign visitors probably don't bookmark your page. In the past when bookmarking a page the favicon.ico file of the site was loaded into the browser's favorite list whenever a page was bookmarked. As that was at that time the only moment a favicon.ico image was loaded, it was a good sign in the logfiles that a page had been bookmarked. I think starting with Firefox (it may have been another browser though), the favicon.ico file is loaded at every page request to function as a visual mark on the tab when using tabbed browsing. Therefore the favicon.ico image is loaded not anymore when bookmarking a site, but at almost every page access.

Older analytics software still use the favicon.ico load as a signal for bookmarking, although it isn't a good indicator for that anymore. This may well cause the high bookmark percentage you see.

[grandma genie]

Hi Lammert - Thank you. I won't worry then about these visitors. I did have a lot of problems with blogs hotlinking to my images, but I put some code in htaccess and that stopped the hotlinking. People are certainly welcome to take my images onto their own desktops and use them ( as long as they don't use copyrighted ones), but I don't like the hotlinking. My server logs are jam packed with bots, but I don't seem to get many regular USA visitors. I don't know why. I used to, but things have changed in the last few years.