How to track humans, but not spiders?

Posted by johnnietheblack on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by johnnietheblack
Published on 2010-05-07T00:14:52Z Indexed on 2010/05/07 0:18 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 519

Filed under:
|
|
|

I am writing a nice little PHP/MySQL/JS ad system for my site - charging by impression. Therefore, my clients would like to be sure that they aren't paying for impressions caused by robots / spiders / etc.

Is there a decently effective way to decipher between human and robot, without doing something obstructive like a captcha, or requesting "no index" or something?

Basically, is there some sort of "name tag" that legit spiders have on so that my site knows their presence, therefore letting me react accordingly?

And, if there isn't...how do ad companies like Google defend against this?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about php

Related posts about advertising