AVG has reconfigured the fake traffic it's been spewing over the Internet disguised as IE6.
In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each address that turns up on Google's results page.
According to the company, more than 20 million people have downloaded the new AVG 8, and this has caused a huge up-tick in traffic on sites across the web, including The Register. Because the scanner attempts to disguise itself as a real live human click, webmasters who rely on log files for their traffic numbers may be unaware their stats are skewed. And others complain that LinkScanner has added extra dollars to their bandwidth bill.
When AVG's fake traffic was highlighted earlier this month, webmasters could filter LinkScanner visits from their log files. Each scan left a unique user agent:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)
AVG has now changed this user agent on the for-pay version of AVG 8. It appears that scans now use this agent as well:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Many webmasters may have no choice but to abandon log file analysis, adopting alternative tools from companies like Google, Yahoo!, comScore, or Nielsen NetRatings and these tools have their drawbacks. comScore's service tends to underestimate traffic from daytime work machines and if you go with Google Analytics, you have to tag your pages with JavaScript - and share your traffic numbers with Google. Plus, these tools won't solve the bandwidth issue.
