Unique visitors and links

[charpress]

I have some graphics placed on a few high volume sites (let's call them "other sites") with links back to me ("my site"). The graphic is physically located on my server and only linked from the other sites.

I was getting excited about all the new traffic I'm getting (about 6,000 unique visitors reported daily) but then I started to wonder: Since the graphics are downloaded from my site to the other site, could each page read at the other site that is pulling the graphic from my server be counted as an unique visitor in my logs? I know it shouldn't be working this way, but still....

[marcs]

You may want to exclude .gif/.jgp and similar requests on from your stats.

You could also prevent hotlinking if you are not getting any visitors from this but merely find your bandwidth wasted.

[HighPR]

We had a similar problem - here's how we handled it:

1. created a separate directory for the linking graphics on our site;

2. used our 'exclude' feature on our web analytics software to block the directory from influencing our traffic stats;

3. FYI - we also blocked internal ip's and customer service ip's - we didn't want our own staff artificially inflating our 'unique visitors' number.

Hope this helps.

[charpress]

Thanks. That's a good idea and I'll try it.