Crawlers Counted as Visits?

[rwwebdesign]

Someone has called my visits totals into question.

They have asserted that some of the visits that I collect off of my webalizer reports are actually visits by crawlers or spiders as opposed to actual people visiting the site.

Do crawlers count as visits in webalizer reports?

If they are counted, about what percentage could we guess is crawlers as opposed to visitors?

Do other reports tell you how many visits are crawlers, and how many are regular people?

[rustybrick]

That depends on your Web statistics program.

I have a personal beef with the industry. Why don't we have a set of standards as to what is a visitor?

Web analytics software statistics range way too much. What I might call a visitor can vary greatly from what you call a visitor.

I have a little graph at my blog (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000279.html) which shows the traffic difference between simply upgrading from one analytics version to the next.

I would like to see some standards.

[rwwebdesign]

Do you know if visits by crawlers are counted in a websites "visits" in webalizer?

[rustybrick]

Do you know if visits by crawlers are counted in a websites "visits" in webalizer?

That I do not know. The Webalizer FAQs (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/faq.html) page doesn't directly say. Maybe try asking in the Webalizer Yahoo Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webalizer/).