This article is thanks to Rudi Shumpert from Code by Numbers who picked up this issue earlier this month where the bot from Bing was artificially inflating Omniture Site Catalyst data.

Today I discovered that Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA) is also being impacted by this bug, thankfully it was easy to discover this using the “Last Visitors” report. Interestingly this is a report I would rarely (if ever) use but after seeing increased traffic to my site over the last couple of weeks decided to drill into the strange traffic using this very granular report.

Fortunately being a reader of Rudi’s blog I immediately recognised a strange set of visitors from Washington, using IE6 with a low screen resolution from msn.com using an IP address beginning 65.55.*.*

When Rudi discovered this in Site Catalyst it was a relatively complex process to filter out the data using a coldfusion tag to prevent the JavaScript loading. I’m neither a developer, nor do I have access to server level code for Squarespace, but with YWA it’s easy to filter data using an IP Address filter:

Step 1: Go to settings, select “exclude your browser and edit report defaults”:

Step 2: Click “edit” in general settings:

Step 3: Go to Statistics Settings, enter an IP address range of 65.55.*.* then click update

As YWA is a real time analytics tool, the erroneous Bing bots will be excluded from forward looking reports. One more little issue dealt with.

Cheers, James.