Visits are not always Visits

As I posted a few months ago I started tracking all my traffic and then posting my reports to everyone. Well that backfired, with posting all my traffic details I opened myself to spam. Automated engines would traverse my reports and see their website on it then constantly hit/visit my site to make sure it was number one. Why you ask? Because of relevance, if the site is number one it would be viewed by everyone that visited my report pages. This adds more traffic to my site and indirectly references to their site. The visits also sucked my bandwidth to an extent that I couldn't manage/afford. It was an ugly proposition, so I had to disable all my links to my reports. Another thing it made me realize is that there are only a handful of people visiting my site a day (not that is a bad thing, I welcome everyone and anyone). With filtering all the spam and bot traffic I went from 200 Visits a day to 10 - 20 Visits a day. It is actually a really good thing, now I can see what content is valuable because real people are looking at it. The thing that kills me is that I already knew this because I have lived through it many times. It is just different when t happens to you. Maybe it is the geek in me that thought/hoped it was a reality. Well I am now using Google Analytics and I hope the spam leaves me alone.

Chris