Where do bots and spiders collect a websites stats. and traffic from?

A silly question I guess (please forgive me I'm still in the early learning stages) - it has intrigued me for sometime now as to if bots and spiders are seeing the same traffic and stats. information as we do or not?

Do they have access to the same information as the sites Cpanel or do they collect information from somewhere else.

I apologise if I have posted in the wrong forum for this. If I have someone might point me in the right direction.

Thanks and cheers.

 

Usually from unprotected access logs or a sites popularity in search engines.

Occasionally if you look for the right terms you can find interesting information about keywords.

 

Thanks for your reply.

Do you mean that they can get access through your actual control panel as well (I hope that this all makes sense).
What sort of data do they extract from there?

Thanks again and cheers.
Suzanne.

 

They don't need to go through a control panel most times, with stats applications like Awstats & Webalizer anyone can look at the stats if the know the address alot of times.

It's just a matter of the stats reports being saved in public directories & people knowing the naming pattern used by the application doing the stats reporting.

 

Very informative - thanks for your help.
Cheers.

 

As long as I know, bots and spiders (they are the same thing) don't collect any traffic information. Please enlighten me.

 

Your sitemap submitted helps in reading the statistics..

 

Now with spiders like Googlebot, MSNBot, Alexa, etc, that info usually comes from toolbars installed on peoples' computers which monitor what the person visits and sends anonymous statistics back to central servers. These larger companies usually share/sell this information amongst themselves.

 

Thanks Joebert,

Your info. has been helpfull and is more than appreciated.

Cheers.