Advice needed by newbie

What are these hits?

[OlRedEye]

I just launched a new site a few days ago so all my traffic comes from Adwords. I see a lot of 1 page and 0 page hits from something.proxy.aol.com in my Awstats
Are these clicks I am paying for? They don't seem to be human. The pattern is too consistent. A few pasted below. Please some advice? The 1 or 2 in the first column is hits - not pages. A page gives quite a few hits per view?
Thanks

cache-dtc-ad13.proxy.aol.com 1 1.43 KB-
cache-rp03.proxy.aol.com 1 1.43 KB-
cache-loh-ac03.proxy.aol.com 1 820 Bytes-
cache-rf05.proxy.aol.com 2 1.84 KB-
cache-mtc-ab14.proxy.aol.com 1 2.47 KB-
cache-loh-ac02.proxy.aol.com 2 2.23 KB-
cache-ntc-ac08.proxy.aol.com 1 818 Bytes-
cache-rr02.proxy.aol.com 1 1.09 KB-
cache-ntc-aa05.proxy.aol.com

[Shannon Moore]

I could be wrong, but I believe those *are* AOL visitors -- either individually or in aggregate (eg. two visits by the same proxy don't necessarily mean two visits by the same person). AOL uses many proxies to speed up and deliver its service, and thus when AOL users hit your site, it's usually from one of the proxies.

I'm a novice when it comes to such things, but hopefully I didn't butcher the basic point too much. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable will respond and set me straight. :)

[OlRedEye]

The strange thing is that in the whole list it is exclusively aol that shows 1 page/1hit or no pages. Normally 1 page will give -+ 7 hits as the graphics etc load (i assume)
ALL the aol hits (and thats about 50% of the total) are 1 or no page - thats strange, and suspicious

[Gmorgan]

I've noticed that a rather large number of AOL visitors are only looking at my front page. Some are looking at it repeatedly over the course of a minute and then leaving. Does AOL have a problem with the click fraudsters?

[Shannon Moore]

Perhaps some AOL users have images turned off? AOL users didn't used to be the most tech savvy folks online (putting it mildly! ;) but these days a lot of business travellers may use AOL to stay connected when travelling, and to save charges may turn images off. Mind you, I haven't used AOL in several years so I can't guarantee that's even an option AOL's software gives them, but I'd assume it's likely available.

Otherwise, you're right, it's odd behaviour to see in the logs. You're not blocking AOL or its IP ranges in your robots.txt file or htaccess (on Apache servers) file, are you? That one hit could be to your robots.txt file, and if it respects your robots.txt that'd be the last you see of that crawler.

Just a thought.

[OlRedEye]

Here's a dumb response :( I don't have a robots.txt file... could that be?
BTW my index and pages are in public_html folder... should robots.txt be in that folder or root?

[Shannon Moore]

Not having a robots.txt shouldn't cause the issue, but it's a good thing to have -- especially if you want to block certain sections of your site from search engine indexing. Not all bots obey the robots.txt file, but the well-behaved ones (Google, et. al) do.

You'd put the robots.txt in your web root, which in your case would be in the public_html folder. You can have multiple robots.txt files.

There's a lot of helpful info here on WebmasterWorld about setting up a good robots.txt file [google.com].