Google Pre-Fetching web pages - how to stop it?

I just found out about Googles new pre-fetching 'service'.

Has anyone configured their site to disallow the pre-fetching of webpages?

 

Can I ask why you would want to do this in the first place?

 

I do not want my bandwidth being sucked away on page requests that are not actually coming from a visitor. Having pages "cached" in such a manner will skew the webstats (although now I know to filter for this header) and will skew my adsense stats as well not to mention the increased bandwidth. I think a webpage should only be served, with the images, when it's actually requested by a human visitor whenever possible.

 

You are wasting time if you worry about such things, plus it could hurt you in the end to do it.

 

I disagree. This was from the CNet article: link

Anytime anyone does something with your content that you do not authorize, your hardwork and your content are being compromised.

 

What does that have to do with you serving pages

Those are users talking about cookies being loaded on their boxes

 

Read the article. When google brings back a page of SERPs, the top ten are pre-fetched by the Firefox browser. This means that ten websites get their pages pulled down to the client without the user ever clicking on a link in the SERPs. This means the page, the images, the CSS, the javascript, the adsense... every bit of the webpage is pulled down and cached on the local hard drive even if it's never viewed. In turn, bad websites can install cookies, do 'drive by activeX installations', etc. and your web surfing would be an open book in a corporate environment. What if a site really is a porn site or a hate site or something the company you work for deems inappropriate. Just becuase you got the result in the SERPs, as far as the company logs go, you were there.

 

You were talking about disallowing this on your web server, not your local PC

 

Yes, there are two sides of the coin. I have already disabled prefetch in the browser. I don't want my pages being requested by anyone other than a real visitor if I can help it. In this case, I can. This saves my bandwidth and keeps my stats from getting skewed.

 

I think it says top one, not top ten.

The cookie thing brings up an interesting point. One of my affiliate programs gives credit to the first affiliate ID that gets set by their cookie. If I am in the top spot, no matter what other affiliates site they click on, I get the credit... hmmm.

If you configure it to disallow prefetching by delivering a 404, does the google user clicking on that prefetched link get a 404? Probably not,surely google would have a work around for that possible issue. I'm not going to spend any time testing it though, too many other things to do.

 

You are correct. I read the sentence wrong and misconstrued it to mean the top results on the first page of the serps.

I'm not delivering a 404 header, just a custom 404 error page based on the prefetch header. It still consumes bandwidth, but because the page is low on graphics, it's not a big deal.

 

This will probably mess up the traffic logs, but it will benefit the visitors, I would accept it.

 

I agree, it is a waste of time to block this, if you don't like it get a cookie management software program like the one "Cookie Monster".

If you want to get this freeware download see:

http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/

There is a lot of other stuff there in addition to this dynamite Cookie management software.

 

Mozilla/Firefox don't support activeX