Back when I started up FaunaTopSites.com, I would monitor the logs and found quite a few people cheating on the stats to try to get to the top of the list. It was pretty easy to tell from the IP addresses. Someone sitting at their keyboard just refreshing the screen over and over again to get the number of visits up in their stats. Actually had some kid admit to me he was doing that.
When you see a large number of TOTAL VIEWS and a small number of UNIQUE VIEWS with the IP address remaining the same for all the views, that is what someone is doing. Perhaps even doing it programmatically with long keystroke macros. However, when you see the opposite, with UNIQUE VIEWS and TOTAL VIEWS nearly the same, someone is using a sort of spam service with a random IP generator just to get the hits to their website. In that case, it is odd because obviously nearly "everyone" is coming to the site, but not even going beyond the first page they visit. I suppose now a lot of raw views are being generated by search engine spiders, so I'm not sure the stats even mean anything any longer.
Perhaps people are still cheating there. Beats me. Not worth my time and effort to monitor it any longer. And it certainly did not earn me any friends when I confronted people about their cheating. Seems that whenever you catch someone lying or cheating, YOU wind up being the bad guy in their eyes.
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