Hey guys, I'm new here and really desperate to find a solution to a problem.

My last webpage had some kind of trouble which I do not understand. I had the page for a little over a month but the stats climbed to over 100 000 hits, the reason why the stat numbers were important was that we were trying to reach a certain number within a limited time - legally of course. After a month, i started wondering whether i had contributed a great deal to the number on the site climbing up so...is it possible that a glitch could have caused my page to somehow refresh without my knowing ? I notice that sometimes when logging onto a page, something strange happens, the green light at the bottom right corner showing the loading progress of page rapidly flashes back and forth. Is it possible this rapid flashing meant the page was reloading each time it did that ?

Can someone please explain to me whether all counters accurately implement the number of times a page is viewed. If I visited my own page 20 times a day, looking at various articles I'd written, would the page counter go up ? I have another page where the counter does not go up all the time when i log on. If I click on my own page 10 times, whether to write a comment or see something, the most number of counts from myself shows to be 2 - 3 so I'm confused by how a counter would go to the 100 000s. What proof can be obtained to provide that aside from refreshing one's page a few times (if this can indeed raise the stats to over 100 000) it is not a machine-glitch etc etc. Is it possible for a machine, like my own computer to artificially inflate these page counters to such a high number ?

Do i need access to the raw server logs, would they be able to help regarding proof ?

I hope my question has been understood as I'm trying to find a way out of this and am completely confused by how the numbers could have gotten so high. I'd have to be clicking night, day and in between to garner such results in a month, and I didn't even have my laptop for 9 days of the month, so that's actually on 22 days I'm supposed to have caused such a large discrepancy. I'm really hoping to find that this was a malfunction of whatever system is in use and would appreciate anyone shedding any light.

many thanks and best regards

can you pm what type of site? ( no posting links..thanks)

stat numbers can get screwed up if a bot keeps going to one page. they can be triggered by a keyword. their server will keep sending hoards of them to the same place. pain in the rear. that sounds like what his happening to you.

i have a web site for my business. my stat counter does not count bots. i can also get detailed results on who has visited. helps me weed out when my own employees do.

If you have access to the raw logs, take a look at them. If it's bots, as Curious mentioned, you'll notice a pattern.

If it is bots/spidering your site, and if there is a cap on bandwidth, you might want to place MetaTags server-side to block those bots (from consuming bandwidth).