Hi greek39,
I apologize for the techobabble re: bots crawling the db.
Re: bots causing downloads … I have already explained this, so for you to tell me I am 100% wrong is shocking for a couple reasons …
- I have explained why/how this can happen & I have imperical data to back it up.
- You’re not backing your argument up with any logic.
There is no rule that says a SE bot has to crawl a pages’ inbound link before re-crawling said page. It will index any page it comes to at whatever url it arrived there with – if it deems it worthy of its index (adds value).
So for example:
- Affiliate greek39 has a website at: http://www.greek39.fake
- someplace on his site he has a link to the casino he’s sponsoring:
casclassic.com/referral.asp?aff_id=greek39 - the bot crawls his site, picks up that link, stores it in memory/db
- sometime that bot decides it time to crawl that link … reads it from memory, loads up the link (counts as an affiliate ‘click’, since it arrived via the referral.asp script).
- when the bot follows that link, it gets redirect to:
- http://www.casinoclassic.com/splash.asp?aff_id=greek39
- the bot notices some content located at this address … saves that link, then continues on it’s business.
- that business will likely be crawling the rest of the site, where – yes you guessed it – it will find the download link:
casclassic.com/download.asp?aff_id=greek39 - the bot saves that link, and follows it…
the download script increments the download counter, then serves up the webinstaller with the affiliates tag embedded. This counts as a started download - So far, we’ve got 1 click & 1 download…
- now, later (that day, or week, etc)… the bot decides it’s time to crawl the casino again to see if there’s any new content there… what’s the casino url?
- http://www.casinoclassic.com/splash.asp?aff_id=greek39
- the bot loads up that URL – notice it’s not calling the referral.asp … therefore NO CLICK.
- the bot scans that page, finds the download link … follows it again …
now we have 2 started downloads from only 1 click.
Annnyway … multiple that times a few hundred+ SE bots out there and you can see how it can skew the numbers pretty quick. I hope that helps you understand how this *might* be what’s going on.