Wow, I got a response from the STATCOUNTER people. Their counter uses javascript, so this makes perfect sense.
Thought I would share....;-)
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The most usual spiders (search engine bots) are both Javascript and image disabled, therefore they can't be triggered at all by 3'rd party counters like Statcounter. Only logging scripts on the same server as the site are able to log them.
Only the image enabled bots, like Google's Image bot and Yahoo's Inktomi can be triggered by the <noscript> part of the Statcounter code, where the link to Statcounter includes a small (1x1 pixel) image. I don't know if there is any Javascript enabled bots, but I don't think there is any?
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Here is the link to the thread at statcounter
http://forum.statcounter.com/vb/showthread.php?t=37683
