I use site stats to know who is visiting site. As I am sure most of you are aware they are only as good as the information that can be gleaned from them. I recently had a fleeting visit from the organisation below. They drew attention to themselves because they left no footprint as to the entry page, viewed pages or exit page at my blogspot. Attributor Corporation Redwood City California United States I do not know this bsuiness and I have nothing against. They can be checked out on google but I thought I would share this with others as they seem to be an organisation that trawls web pages for their clients to see if you are referring to their clients' names or weblinks etc. "Attributor....continuously monitor billions of pages on the Web, providing real time usage analysis as its content is distributed across the Internet.... protect the value of its original content investment and offer increasingly focused products to the market and its customers." Now I have seen that that statement "protect the value of its original content investment " before in business and its usually targetted towards revenue generating businesses... just giving you a heads up.
Futurely lots of crawlers may visit your sites, like news bots, major search engines crawlers, statistic crawlers, small search engine crawlers etc. Nothing to worry about if they are not eating too much badwidth.
I've seen many suspicious-looking bots crawling my sites. I know that some of them are looking for email addresses to sell to spammers. Others may be looking for certain types of content to steal. Who really knows what they're doing.
Generally I don't think there's anything to worry about as long as they respect robots.txt. If they don't respect robots.txt, ban them. Cyveillance is the worst offender - they scrape your site at a rapid pace, ignore robots.txt, and ignore all requests to stop.
Thanks for all your replies. I was wondering what that group were up to... vpguy, good point "ban them" - I like your style.