story view counts

[CeasarBoobage]

I know that there are a ton of automated services that crawl Lit, but does anyone have an idea of how many and how often they do this?

It's a long shot, but is there any chance the site admins filter out search engine (etc) from the view counts on the member submissions view page?

 

[sr71plt]

Hold that thought until later in the day when the experts on this tend to post. It's a good question. The answers to that have always been too technical for me to comprehend.

 

[TxRad]

SR, remember the views we used to get even before the story posted. Those were bots and web crawlers. Search engines and such. That doesn't happen anymore. Manu seems to have plugged the hole so to speak.

Easy answer.

We'll now wait for the experts.

 

[Darkniciad]

Long ago, Laurel made a post on the GB when views were just coming online that the views would be about 50% higher if it was just raw "story accessed" hits. ( If I'm remembering the percentage correctly )

They were filtered from the beginning, and it stands to reason that known search engine agents ( and probably social media agents now ) as well as clicks on multiple pages of a story would be what's getting dropped.

And TX, I really don't think those were search engines or anything else causing those hits. The way they accumulated just doesn't jive with even the most poorly programmed rogue content scraper. More likely, that was a bug in a script somewhere. It was probably just the first symptom of huge behind the scene changes that seem to be causing other hiccups now.

My own comparisons of my work on multiple sites cross-referenced with Alexa traffic data have led me to the conclusion that the views we see are probably inflated by approximately 25%.

What is most likely causing this inflation are rogue spiders, foreign search engines, data gathering companies, etc., which aren't as easy to catalogue and filter.

Those same things are hitting other sites, but due to Literotica's high profile, they hit harder here than they do on sites with less traffic.

 

[sr71plt]

Interesting, Dark. Of course at 25 percent inflation, it still beats any other site I've posted to.

 

[CeasarBoobage]

Awesome y'all, that's great info, thank you.

Even a 25% BS ratio, I think the view counts are still decent. Gotta love the popularity of this site to keep the eyes on our stories.