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It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but from the article, * If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs an
by jeff18 16y ago
It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but from the article,
* If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs and stats. Consider what happens when a bunch of prefetch requests are made to one of your pages, but the user never actually visits the page. The server (or stats package) doesn’t know the difference.
To clear this up, Firefox sends along an HTTP header, X-moz: prefetch, but you need some logic on the server side to detect it.
- WillyF 16y agoThat's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. Thanks.
- robgough 16y agoDo you just count the prefetch for what it is... a "maybe" page view. Or when the browser shows the prefetched page can it send a "view" (or load it again in the background - but that seems wasteful).
- mseebach 16y agoYou'll only get the "maybe" hit, and never the real hit, so you can't accurately detect this on the serverside. Javascript on the page isn't run until you actually visit the page, so that will be unaffected. I don't think this is a big issue since JS-analytics are already superior to server-side log-analysis (caching alone).