How do web crawlers affect site statistics?

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Posted by LM on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by LM
Published on 2010-04-12T18:18:57Z Indexed on 2010/04/12 18:23 UTC
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What are ways in which web crawlers (both from search engines and non-search engines) could affect site statistics (e.g., when doing AB-testing different page variations)? And what are ways to take care of these problems?

For example:

  1. Do a lot of people writing web crawlers often delete their cookies and mask their IPs, so that web crawlers often show up as different users each time they crawl the site?

  2. What are heuristics to use to recognize that something is a bot? (I'm guessing any sophisticated enough bot can be indistinguishable from a real user, if it wants to -- is this correct?)

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