search engines Vs analysis information

Good or Bad

[britnet]

This may seem a little off the scale of things somehow, but recently a work colleague of mine said that he read somewhere about stat monitors being bad for search engines, by this I don’t mean a simply stat counter, I’m talking about more in depth for instance I found one similar to ours and its called human click, sorry for mentioning names…

Now the way this work is like most monitoring systems these days it shows browser types and IP address etc, anyway the point being that it collects information about your users, for me this can only be good but he read somewhere that a monitoring system of this calibre lets say will be if not now in the future, be classed as bad via search engines.

I would like to hear from some more experts there opinions on this….

Hope everyone had a good Christmas

[Robert Charlton]

britnet - It depends how your system gets its information and how it affects page urls and site navigation. Some setups shouldn't have any search effect. Some will be a disaster.

I've encountered a number of click monitoring systems on enterprise level sites that monitor internal navigation via url tracking strings or changing nav links to javascript. These interfere with PageRank distribution throughout a site and should never be used.

Other analytic programs don't touch navigation, but instead respond to javascript code embedded on each page, and shouldn't create a problem for search. They can't, though, track spiders, which can be a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on what you're trying to do. With some setups, the stats are insecure and are subject to prowling.

Other software simply analyzes your server logs. This presents the least possible interference with site operation, but presents its own set of limitations and advantages.

Your choices depend on what you're trying to monitor and how aware you are of particular issues the software introduces. WebmasterWorld has a Website Analytics - Tracking and Logging [webmasterworld.com] forum that's probably your best source for more detail discussion on analytics and tracking software.