Blog spam referred id's might account for IE usage stats

Many people have commented on the relatively high number of IE users in their log data for their sites and for those sufficiently nerdy to care, they despair over the fact that IE remains so high. The person who runs "the Jer zone" tried another way to look at the stats.

Their data shows that in the raw logs, IE is way ahead, but in the logs of this other technique (a transparent image "web bug") IE is way down. The theory is that blog spamming bots send in a faked browser id showing that they are an IE browser. The regular logs for the site pick this up, and the web bug method bypasses it (the bots don't render the page, they simply force data directly into the submission pages - therefore they don't download web bug images or execute any on-screen javascript code).
With this taken into account, on that particular site, IE drops dramatically and Safari (Mac users) and Firefox (Mac/PC/*nix users) usage rises relatively.

That of course is that person's site. We use our own tracking system here as well as on our sister sites and we still see a majority of users on IE.

Personally, I use Safari and will continue to do so until FireFox can do some of the things Safari can - but on the PC, I always use FireFox unless the site is stubbornly insisting that I use IE (and then I tend to just stop going to that site).

Posted by Eric at April 11, 2005 04:02 PM | TrackBack