Most of us depend on Google analytics or other statcounters to track our site’s performance. There is a very powerful tracking device called Awstats in our cPanel that is rarely used by bloggers. Internet Marketers tend to use this device more as it can track in more detail if compared to other site tracking scripts. For example, Awstats can differentiate hits from Search spiders and human visitors. Knowing when and how many times Search spiders are crawling our site can help us improve our SEO efforts.
Learn to use this free tool by watching this Video.
Hi Costa
When you look at the top visitors / bots you can see that some of the unknown bots are using a lot of bandwidth.
Would you recommend banning some of the IP’s for those bots?
You also showed some visitors staying for longer than an hour.
What are they doing in that time?
Are they scraper bots?
Hi Keith,
Yes, there are tons of unknown bots and to find out, you can actually copy and paste that ip address into Google search to see what it is all about. Most of it are scrappers as you have suspected. You can of course ban them if you like, but then another one will come in the next minute. So it is always a cat and mouse game. Frankly, I have given up fighting them if they do not mess up my bandwidth to much.
As for those who stays over 20 to 30 minutes, my educated guess is they did not close the browser window when they surfed to another site. Can’t think of any other logical reason for staying in one site for so long.