Forum Moderators: DixonJones
have been reading this site for a while now and definately seems the place to be for information.
my question this time is...
i have been noticing the file favicon.ico being requested quite a bit through my stats package (T-stats). now i know this is the small logo that can be stored next to a name in your favourites, or address bar.
does the fact that this file is being requested (i haven't actually got one) mean that people are adding your site to their favourites?
Paul.
A request for favicon.ico used to be a pretty good indicator of a bookmark; but now that request is pretty much unreliable for that metric as more and more browsers are displaying the icon in the address bar, tab title, etc, depending upon the browser.
You could limit requests for Internet Explorer and other browsers to get an metric, and that might be reliable for a while, until the next generation of IE is released.
Larry
i'm not overly bothered in tracking it, just noticed it when analysing stats that's all.
:)
does the fact that this file is being requested (i haven't actually got one) mean that people are adding your site to their favourites?
No. It used to be a halfway good indication, but Mozilla requests it all the time instead of just when adding to favorites.
Since most websites have only a tiny percentage of visitors who do an Add to Favorites, the remaining signal is easily lost in the noise.
A while back, I did an exercise on my own logs. I found X entries that a naive weblog analysis might claim were Add-to-Favorites (that is, looks like correct version of IE was browser). I then threw out a) entries that close inspection showed were something else pretending to be IE b) double-fetches, repeated too fast to have been sent by a human and c) fetches coming from what were clearly automated crawl software. The remainder was about X/4.
So, when people look at favicon.ico fetches and proclaim that they're getting lots of bookmarkings, they're usually way off.
