Am I Crazy? - Is GA tracking Yahoo! Spiders as Regular Vistors?

[100up]

...I hope not, because it's messing up my stats!

There was a previous thread on the Adsense board where I asked the same question 5 months ago, but it kind of flopped [webmasterworld.com ]

Has anyone else seen this?

Upwards of 100 visits per day, from one particular city at a time, say, 'East Sparta, Ohio', with Inktomi Corporation as the service provider.

They have a 100% bounce rate, 100% new, 00:00 time on site, 1.00 pages/visit. Looks like a spider to me, but they count as visits.

Very strange.

[onetruth]

We also have been having the same issue with GA reporting these bots as human traffic. We have a much larger issue because we have 16K visits from this in the past month and has increased by 98% since the month prior. Can we setup something in GA to prevent this from showing up as a regular visitor?

Here is our stats for past month from East Sparta that are direct sources:
Visits: 16,246
Pages / Visit: 1.01
Avg. Time on Site: 00:00:03
% New Visits: 99.96%
Bounce Rate: 99.18%

[lucy24]

I have an analogous issue with piwik. I think analytics programs are built on the assumption that robots don't read javascript and therefore don't follow links to the underlying php. This assumption is probably due for an update. Especially from GA, since their own robots now do look at .js.

They probably know enough to exclude the googlebot-- either from GA stats or from visiting in the first place. But not robots in general.

[cgrantski]

My experience is: many many bots read and follow links in javascript but few of them follow links to images. An exception of course is the google images bot. Maybe Yahoo is indexing images lately.

[netmeg]

I've seen Statcounter count Yahoo visits in recent months as well. Perhaps Yahoo changed something about its spider, and the various stats and analytics programs haven't caught up yet.

[onetruth]

Anyone else seeing them coming from East Sparta, Ohio? The IPs looks to be all over the world which makes me suspect it is not really Yahoo but made to look like Yahoo?

[enigma1]

I see the ranges you mentioned in the other post. They're setup to look like a regular browser but have lots of oddities. They can't process the jscripts in my case and they do repeated accesses to various resources on the same page something a browser doesn't do. That is for inline HTML resources.

I am contemplating whether I should use js to cover the inline HTML elements or maybe utilize their buggy code for my own benefit. If yahoo wants to access the same thing thousands of times within the same second it definitely gives me lots of ideas.