Webalizer is showing thousands and thousands of hits in one week for some web sites i am hosting. these numbers seem to be artificially high. do hits include search engine robots or spiders that are searching these websites? if so how can you tell which stats are from search engines and which are from real visitors?

Keep in mind 'hits' are *any* hit from the server...

Example: Page with 5 images would generate 6 hits (one for each image and the page itself), for every page view.

i know that hits includes each file on page viewed. i just want to know if a search engine spider or robot searching a site will generate "hits" or is it only trafic that comes from a browser?

any _file_ that is loaded from your site is generating a hit, no matter what it is (.html, .gif, .jpg, .zip)...

spiders generate hits aswell because they load .html pages; they generate less hits (in most cases) as they don't load gfx;
you can see spiders access stats - ie. scooter.altavista.com

Paul,

The simple answer is that anything that generates a GET request will display hits, that includes search engines and any type of HTTP monitoring service (but not ping monitoring services).

scooter.altavista.com is a dead link. what is supposed to be there?

gOriginally posted by netastic
scooter.altavista.com is a dead link. what is supposed to be there?

Nothing, scooter is the name of the AltaVista "spider" (get it, its like a scooter moving over the web :D)