Is it a spider?

[topher]

Hi all,
I'm new at this, so pls forgive...
I noticed my server logs showing "hits" to an image that only is displayed when a customer's credit card is rejected by the gateway. In fact it is "hit" as much as main navigation images, and that might suggest a HUGE amount of rejections, but I doubt it.
Can spiders crawling my /images dir be the cause of this? Should I be diallowing spiders from /images?
thanks!

[jdMorgan]

> Can spiders crawling my /images dir be the cause of this?

Yes.

> Should I be disallowing spiders from /images?

It would seem a prudent thing to do. Better yet, organize your images into two directories: Those images that you'd like to use to get traffic from image searches, and those that wouldn't serve well as 'ads' for your site.
Disallow robots from spidering the non-beneficial images to save bandwidth and prevent problems interpreting your stats.

Jim