Forums » Suggestions & Feature requests



Google Instant Preview (New Bot logged as visit)

As you may have noticed, the new "Google Instant Preview" feature comes with a new bot from Google that executes Javascript and therefore is logged as a visit by clicky.

User-Agent of the bot is
Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13

I would suggest, not to logg visits from this bot in the future because its just a bot. What do you think?

As a workaround clicky-users you can do something in php like

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"Google Web Preview")){}else{ echo'your clicky code';}

Posted Thu Nov 11 2010 12a by pold***


I would agree that Clicky should not count these hits. Only user actions really matter.

Posted Thu Nov 11 2010 12:46a by zacwit***


Not log please

Posted Thu Nov 11 2010 2:47a by snobb***


Please don't log, vote from here too!!!

Posted Thu Nov 11 2010 9:06a by emckibb***


Thanks for the note. That's super lame. I can't fix it at the moment, too many things going on, but I view this as high priority so will try to get it fixed by end of month.

Posted Thu Nov 11 2010 1:55p by Your Friendly Clicky Admin


i think it should be logged somewhere

even though it is not a real visitor to the site - someone has viewed the site, (and then has either choosen to visit or not )

maybe it should be logged as a "PREVIEW" but still very useful to know - as it does help with web site design issues

if lots of people preview a site and you dont see increase in visitors - maybe you need to look at the design

once users start to use and understand this preview, i think we will see a change in click throughs on our sites - maybe it will not be so important to be on top 3 positions - if they are poor design, or dont look like they offer what was searched for - then other sites further down may get the visits if they clearly show an answer to the search


i think getclicky should track these previews - or offer a user option for webmasters to track or not track

regards

nicholas

Posted Thu Nov 18 2010 7:18a by njbclic***


Why not make a special bots reports?

Posted Fri Nov 19 2010 2:47a by tixo***


FYI, made changes today that will ignore these visits. They're not live yet but will be by end of day.

Posted Mon Dec 6 2010 3:02p by Your Friendly Clicky Admin


Thanks Admin!

Nicholas, I think the preview bot caches the previews. That means that it will hit your site once every now and then to refresh but those hits won't be the same as someone viewing the preview on Google. It's much the same as a hit from the normal Googlebot. For that reason it's probably not worth logging it in Clicky.

Posted Fri Dec 10 2010 2:50a by eshel***


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