Confused About Who Visits My Photographs

I wonder the same thing. Thanks for the question.

They're bots. Here's a discussion on bots.

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2132642

Though Beverly Hills is often real. i've had comments from there and, besides, I've seen "90210" enough to know that people do live there and have computers.

Joseph...Thanks for getting back on this. I read the link. I still don't know what a "BOT" is. Do you? Possibly you can let me know. I would appreciate it. Ross Lewis

An automated page access by a search engine like Google. It's how they index the contents of the web.

Thank you, Jim. I appreciate your getting back to me.

Second and third responses in the discussion I linked seem pretty clear to me --
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LC Bailey 27 Days Ago

Bot's or crawlers are what search engines like Google, or Bing use to collect page data for their databases. So when someone searches for your name they might see a link to your fineartamerica.com profile page.

Dan Alias 27 Days Ago

The bots are indexing the site so people can find you in a search engine. I don't know of any way to tell the difference other than the main ones that always pop up. The mantra seems to be "don't pay attention to visitor stats. They mean nothing. Only sales count."
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I deleted some text about "malicious bots" because I do not believe any that visit FAA woujld fall into that category other than inflating view counts.

We have asked Sean, the owner and programmer if he could make the bots not part of the visitor count. Maybe he will at some point although I don't know FAA or the programmer view on the bots being part of the count.

Bots have been around since the begin of the Internet. That is how search engines find content they want to include in their search results. The used to be called crawlers and no one that I have ever seen has put them in the visitors counter until I seen it being done on FAA.

They mean nothing at all as far as real visitors, meaning real shoppers, to you FAA gallery.

The entire visitor count is pretty much meaning less here. You are much better off worrying about creating hits from outside FAA then worrying about what the counter of visitor counter says.

The other thing that makes the count worthless is it counts your own visits and the visits from other FAA members. FAA members may buy a few things, but they are not really "the" market you want to target.

I hardly ever look at mine and unless some one goes in looks and posts the number here, I have no idea what the counter or visitor count is.

a bot is a device that a search engine sends to gather data. it's a worker bee.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

It doesn't count your own visits if you are logged in. Other than that Floyd is spot on.

JC - perhaps - but you can "like" yourself more than once.

Bots aren't just search engines.

A lot of bots are marketing, spam and hacking bots also.

Just to give you and idea of traffic that is attributed to bots, last week I did an analysis on my 4 sites I run, I could identify atleast 50-60% as some kind of bot (search,marketing,spam or hacking), and probably if I looked in more detail, I would say I would find another 30%.

It's a bit disheartening that so much traffic is not human, and is just mostly 'noise'. :(