Question

I would like to track all views to a page using php and mysql. I will be tracking the number of times a person viewed the page and the ip address along with the current date. However is there a way to make sure your tracking actual users rather than bots/spiders?

Answer 1

Two options that I see:

1. Create a “hidden” link on your home page to a honey pot. Any one who hits the honey pot page should be considered a bot and not included in your stats

2: Not a fool proof way, but you could compare the browser’s User Agent string to a white list of known web browsers. This string can be spoofed so its not the most reliable.

Personally, I’d go with the first option.

For the honey pot:

on your home page I’d add something like this:

<a href="totallyNotATrap.php" style="Display:none">ReallyNotATrap</a>

and on the honey pot page itself something like this:

$BotIp=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
//DB connection 
Insert into BlackList($BotIp,$Date,$otherDataYouCareAboutLogging);
//close DB Connection

Then for your stats code simply compare every user’s Ip to the BlackList table. If the user isn’t on it, record the stats.

EDIT

As pointed out below, googlebot can get tricked by this. If this is something that matters to you (if your just filtering for your own stats and not filtering content it shouldn’t matter), include your honeypot page in your Robots.txt. Google will read the text file and avoid the trap. Other nasty bots will fall into it. Since google will avoid our trap, I would also use option 2 and filter out Google’s User Agent String from the stats.