Talking HEADs
We made a small change over the weekend to make bit.ly click total displays more accurate. We’re now screening out http HEAD requests.
A HEAD request occurs when someone, or something, requests a small amount of information about an url. You might use a HEAD request to find out what site a given bit.ly url is pointing to, or if a particular link contains an MP3. You don’t actually have to visit the website.
We never used to see many HEAD requests, but that’s changed as url-shortening and micro-blogging have become more popular, and more mainstream. Today, there are a number of browser plug-ins that automatically expand short urls, and automated scripts that translate your twitter stream into blog entries. Some of these utilities make HEAD requests for bit.ly urls.
HEAD requests are still a tiny fraction of our traffic, but we’ve seen them increase over the last week or two, and we decided we needed to adjust click metrics in response.
HEAD requests are definitely an indication of interest in a given url, but they don’t necessarily result in a direct clickthrough to a long url in a browser. Consequently, we’ve decided to begin removing HEAD requests from our click counts. While there may be some value in knowing that HEAD requests have been made to your bit.ly link, we don’t feel they merit inclusion in our click totals.
Our primary goal in doing this is to more accurately reflect genuine user traffic for your bit.ly link. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out more features to segment traffic and to help you distinguish between bot and crawler traffic and genuine clicks.
It is important to note that every click you see on the info page is a real request that was made to bit.ly. We can’t force a script, a crawler, or a browser extension to follow the bit.ly redirect to the destination server. When they don’t, your bitly clicks might register a bit higher than what is shown in the server logs of the destination website.
We’ll continue to take steps to screen out those clicks which are obviously not following the redirect in order to deliver the most accurate depiction of your short url traffic possible.
We believe the best place to help us grow into the url service you love is right here within our own community of bit.ly users. We welcome your ideas and feedback.
