We welcome search engines to our site - to index our content and point their visitors back to us where appropriate, but such search engines are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. How much traffic to our web site is true visitor traffic, and how much is automata?

Our Current Visitors page allows us to take a snapshot of the HTML and PHP pages that use our standard template that have been called up, and from where, in the last five minutes. The database records which browser was in use, the referring page and the country of origin and makes a fascinating read.

Our Most Popular Pages display looks back at yesterday's log files and tells us where people have visited - and a bias towards a particular page will tend to indicate heave real traffic as automata tend to spider evenly.

Pie charts for the last 4 weeks give us a variety of other statistics, and we have many additional reports from this source and extra information we can call up (password protected or from our own URLs only) on the earlier reports.

And here is another interesting pointer - a graph of log file size for the last four weeks

We noticed a distinct weekly "cyclic" flow in this graph (it will automatically update as this blog archives, so you may not see it if you come back here in 2008 or later!) and as automata run 24 x 7 for the most part, we're pretty sure that the peaks and troughs are caused by real visitors.

I started with the question "What proportion of our web traffic is robots? when perhaps I should have asked "What proportion of our web traffic is generated by real human beings browsing at the time?". From the current peaks and troughs on the graph, and the other evidence, I'm guestimating that the figure is somewhere between 40% and 65%, with a very high proportion of that being business rather than home users.
(written 2007-06-19 06:44:20)

 A606 - Web Application Deployment - Apache - log files and log file tools
G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility

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If I say 'I am fine', what do I mean?
Fancy going to Glastonbury?
End of File on a Java BufferedReader
The kind spirit of Melksham
What proportion of our web traffic is robots?
Trying things in Python
Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP
A review of a week and a trip to Brugge
Horses of Brugge
Bathtub example
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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