Http Status Code 206

[gouri]

I was looking at my server logs and I see the number of requests that show a status code of 206 increasing.

I am trying to determine what the reason might be.

Could having anchor links on a page be the reason? Those are links on a page that take you to a specific section of the same page. Visitors might be clicking on them.

I found this on the web and I thought that it may be useful to try to figure this out.

206 - Partial Content
A status code of 206 is a response to a request for part of a document. This is used by advanced caching tools, when a user agent requests only a small part of a page, and just that section is returned.

Where it says user agent above does that mean human visitors or just visits from the search engine bots?

I would appreciate your help.

[jdMorgan]

User-agent is the "HTTP agent" of the user -- For example a browser or a search robot.

206-Partial Content means that the user-agent is requesting the resource in "chunks" and not all at once. This behaviour is rare among normal browsers and search robots, but very common with things like Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader when a .pdf file is downloaded. Other "download tools" use it as well, since it makes pausing and resuming the download possible, as well as enabling multiple connections to your server to be established, with each connection downloading a "piece" of the same (usually large) file.

Whether it's good or bad really depends on the specific user-agent and on what resources you host on your site. If you don't have any .pdf or similar files hosted, then you may be getting a bunch of unwelcome "site downloader" traffic -- only a look at your server access log files and traffic stats by user-agent will tell.

Jim

[gouri]

Thank you for this information. I did not know these things.

I am now going to look at the server logs and see what the user-agents are.

I don't have any PDFs or similar files so that is one thing that I think is not the case.

If possible, can you please tell me what "site-downloader" traffic is?

[caribguy]

Gouri,

Have you seen the Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification [webmasterworld.com] forum?

Also helpful: [google.com...]

[gouri]

This is great information.

I am going to go through it and also look at my server logs more to see if I can find out what might be the reason for the http status code 206 happening.