: Do crawlers add page views on a forum? I have a MyBB forum and I get multiple page views on new threads within 3-5 minutes of posting. I manually submit new URLs through Google Webmaster

@Holmes151

Do crawlers add page views on a forum?


Quite probably. Crawlers make HTTP requests like any real visitor. Unless your forum software specifically excludes bots from it's page view count then bot traffic is included. (However, even if the forum separates bot traffic in its stats, I wouldn't have thought it would do this is real time as there are extra steps necessary in order to determine whether it is a bot or not - and you want to avoid doing this as the page is served to the client.)


which should if anything account for 1 page view, but not multiple.


When Google indexes a URL you could well get more than 1 visit from different crawlers (mobile, desktop, etc.).

Check your access logs / analytics / stats software. Check the IP addresses (reverse lookup), user-agents and HTTP referers. With just a handful of page views you should be able to determine whether these are bots or real visitors.

As @Zdenek suggested in comments, the multiple page views could simply be down to the browsers pre-fetch mechanism when you are viewing related pages eg. <link rel="prefetch" href="...">. Linked pages can be downloaded in the background (triggering a page view) in order to speed up the user's browsing experience.

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