I use Stat Counter and am uncertain about the content of the “Page Loads†number. When the search engine spiders crawl a website that uses Stat Counter, does each crawled page register as a “Page Load� If so, then it seems we have to devalue those statistics a bit to get a sense of actual human visitors to our websites. In sum, does anyone know if the visits of search engine spiders are registering as Stat Counter page loads?
imo Statcounter is the best free off-site stat counter available. Just look at their pr and alexa rank. To answer your question, most search engines will not cause a pageview to be recorded in statcounter. I'm not sure what method they use to exclude the search engines from this process however, the system is not perfect. I notice occasionally that slurp will show up about once per day in my logs. Also I would think that if the program is unable to determine that the visitor is a search engine or other crawler that is not well known may cause statcounter to think that its a real visitor.