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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3364 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Wikipedia Traffic is down 300K people a day

The interesting takeaway from the article I get is that the switch from HTTP to HTTPS is preventing fake page views. I'm now extremely curious if this happens to most of the major sites.





jleopold  ·  3364 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It should. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It a series of rules that govern how information is moved on the internet. Every time you load a web page, information (hypertext) for the page is transfered from the server to you computer by these protocols. HTTPS is HTTP Secure, and when it is used, the information is encrypted. Bots do not do well with the encrypted information, and so their page views never happen. I get shakey here, and my Google-fu isn't helping, but I believe bots have difficulties with encrypted information because they operate similarly to the third-parties encryption protects against. So, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, but instead an internet wide thing.