Favicon.Ico Not Found

Reliable Indicator of Bookmarking?

[Pedent]

Is there anything other than someone booking marking a site that is likely to result in a favicon.ico not found in a log file (e.g. search engine bots)?

Or is this a reliable way of gauging how many visitors have liked what they've found?

Thanks as ever,

Pedent.

[mack]

Some browsers (typicaly conquirer) display the favicon.ico even if the site is not in the users favourites.

Mack.

[RobinC]

And mozilla has a hidden config item that lets you *try* and get it even if there's no reference on the page. Plus, if you're using tabbed browsing in it, then the tab gets the favicon too.

Got to admit I find them very cool ;-)

[closed]

Some browsers will look for it every time it visits a page on your site. I think Mozilla does that. So no, the number of hits on favicon.ico isn't very reliable as a gauge to see how many people bookmarked your pages.

AWStats gets around that by only counting favicon.ico hits for IE users. So the number of actual bookmarked pages would almost always be more than that.

[Pedent]

Thanks for all that; very helpful.

So if I calculate the number page views with Mozilla / Conquirer, deduct that from the number to Favicon.Ico not founds, then what I have left will be a good indicator of the number of times I've been bookmarked?

[closed]

A better thing to do would be to put an actual favicon.ico on your site. That way, requests to favicon.ico don't show up in your error log.

You'll have to go through your raw logs to see which browsers use favicon.ico just for bookmarked pages, and which browsers look for favicon.ico for all pages. It's easy to figure out which is which because the former would only occasionally request the icon, while the latter would have multiple requests in a short period of time as your visitor traverses your site. If you use shortcut icons under other names on your site, you'll have to account for that too.