Exit Page

what the heck is this?

[Emilio]

/Users/ianbullett/Desktop/http_mydomain.com_content_view_19_29_.html

While looking at one of my site's stats, I saw this as an exit page. It's the first time I see it. What the heck does it mean?

[cgrantski]

Are your site stats collected by page tagging?

[Emilio]

Are your site stats collected by page tagging?

I don't know what that means. I am using www.statcounter.com

Thank you

[cgrantski]

Okay, yes you are using page tagging. On the StatCounter site it says "Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page" and the "simple piece of code" is often called a javascript tag.

What has happened is that somebody, logged in to a desktop PC somewhere as "ianbullett", has copied one of your pages to their hard disk and has viewed it in a browser from there. When they did that, the piece of code was activated and sent a record of the view to StatCounter along with the storage location of that page, which at the time was their hard disk. It showed up as an exit page because they didn't do anything else after viewing that page, so StatCounter considered that view to be the end of a "visit."

Hope that helps. People often copy site pages for later reference or as a kind of bookmark, so it's not necessarily any kind of piracy.

[Emilio]

OK, Now it makes sense. Thank you cgrantski. I really appreciate the help.

[cabowabo]

Most of the time the people that do this are your competitors. Advice here is to go back to your stats program, find their IP and ban it so they are served an "Under Construction" message.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[cgrantski]

I think that might be premature. Weigh the cost of banning a competitor against accidentally banning somebody who may have saved that page because they might want to buy something in the future. A lot of people prefer saving a page to bookmarking it.

And what if the competitor got to the site via an ISP? You'd be risking blocking somebody later on who had nothing to do with it, and the competitor will be back through a different proxy.

Besides, so what if a competitor visits your site? Will blocking the IP successfully prevent them from doing whatever horrible thing it is that they want to do?