web traffic analysis

[deniseb]

Don't know if this is the right forum, but does anyone know if images that are hotlinked counted in the unique visitors total of the website's logs?

I mean, if someone is viewing an image hosted on my server, but displayed on someone else's website, is this counted in my website traffic? I know it is using my bandwidth, but I need to know if it also shows up in the unique visitor count.

If so, does anyone know how to differentiate "unique visitors" from "hot linked traffic"?

Thanks!

[The_Magus]

Hi:

There was a long explanation of unique visitors on this site a while ago.

I think you will find that there is no connection between unique visitors and "hot linked traffic". It might well be that the term hot linked traffic is what is generally called "hits" being the total of the number of parts of each web page viewed by all visitors. "Hits" are the total items viewed and is kind of a useless number because each site and each page is made up of a different number of parts (images, buttons etc) so the number of hits cannot be compared between sites. We had a lady here who used to brag about the hits to her site which impressed all her friends because they did not realize that she had about 50 navigation button (images) on each page which increased the total very rapidly when compared to another site with only a few images and a text based navigation system.

I am a little confused as how an image can be hosted on your server and displayed on someone else's web site - do you mean viewed on someone else's computer??? Or even that someone else has a link to your images?

Cheers

Jack

[deniseb]

Thanks Magus... I just can't seem to get a handle on these counts. Yes, the website owner provides free hosting for images and flash files for sites like MySpace. So, the images are hosted on his server but not actually viewed from his website. The confusion with the number of unique visitors arises because he has not really started to market the website yet, however there seems to be a lot of unique visitors. So, I thought perhaps it was counting the images being viewed on someone else's site.

Maybe I'm wrong. Thanks for your reply,
Denise

[The_Magus]

Dear Denise:

Now you have me confused! I don't understand how the fact that the images are hosted on a server and viewed by other sites has or could have anything to do with the traffic or stats of the site you are concerned about. Are the images in a folder on your site or someplace else on the server. If they are not part of your site there should be no impact on your stats or bandwidth.

For example, the server I use also hosts over 900 other sites but none of these has anything to do with my stats - as far as I know only the images or pages that are viewed though my site are counted. These images are in a folder on my site and can only be reached by linking through my site.

Having said that some idiot took a complete page including the images and pasted it onto some silly chat program without changing the links so every time someone looks at that page it shows up in my stats because the links bring up my photos. In a way this has the same result as if they had posted the link on the site and images.

Because they are calling up my photos this counts against the bandwidth for my site, I guess but fortunately it is so large that it causes no problems.

What I am getting at is that the images are on my site and have to be reached by a link to my site even if it is not posted as a URL. I could mess up the whole thing by renaming the images and uploading a new page which would nullify the original links contained in the page which was copied and pasted into their chat page.

Cheers - ever onward and upward.

Jack

[deniseb]

Thanks Magus,
I'll try to clarify. Yes the images are linked through my site. The site owner is allowing people from MySpace to use images on their profile pages that are stored on his server. He is providing them with the code to link to these files.
The reason I posted the question about how this effects the unique visitor count was because there seems to be alot of unique visitors for a site that hasn't really started advertising yet.
Hope that clears up the confusion.
Thanks again,
Denise