Do spiders that show up in the Internet Spider Activity report count against my billable sessions?

Environment:

Enduser activity
Oracle B2C Service, All versions

Resolution:

The data viewed in the standard report:

Internet Spider Activity
ac_id -139
\Public Reports\Service\Site Reports

Does not count in your billable sessions.

If you have questions around what generates a session and how you can prevent inaccurate session billing on your site please review Demystifying Session Usage (PDF). Some simple mis-steps in customization and configuration can increase billable sessions.  For more information, see Session usage information.

When a known spider, such as googlebot, indexes your site that activity is not recorded in regular tables, but instead is moved into the spider_track table. This will keep known spiders from causing a spike in your data such as answer views, sessions and other end-user activity. The standard report mentioned above can be used to see what known spiders are indexing your site.

Because of the consistent expansion of web spiders there might be times when a new and unknown spider indexes your site which does cause a spike in your answer views and or sessions. When you discover new spiders hitting your site you can always add them to the configuration setting:

SEC_SPIDER_USER_AGENT
Defines custom User Agents that are known web spiders. Valid entries include a comma-separated list of User Agent sub-strings (for example, MyCustomSpider or InternalGoogle). Values for this setting are case sensitive. Browsers supplying this User Agent will not experience different behavior on end-user pages in order to be in compliance with the major web search providers, though they will be considered a web spider for statistics collection. Default is blank.

When you add a new spider to this setting any future activity from that spider will be routed to the spider_track table. Please do not be alarmed if you do not see anything in this setting to begin with as a separate list is kept of globally known spiders.

Path to setting(s): Select Configuration from the navigation area > Site Configuration > Configuration Settings > and search by Key.

For more information on accessing the Configuration Editor and editing settings, refer to Answer ID 1960: Editing Configuration Settings.

For further information on investigating spider activity on Oracle B2C Service sites see

Answer ID 1723: Spike in data for site traffic or answers viewed for a given day