Hi all,

I have a classic ASP hit counter which up till July 15th has been working fine. The way the program works, when a visitor hits the site, I set a session variable and log the hit in an Access table on the server. There are some glitches but essentially it's been pretty accurate for two years.

On July 15th, I suddenly started getting several hundred hits per day more than normal. But the hits don't represent an overall increase in traffic from the web; they are coming from Google's IP address - but the referring site URL is always anonymous.

My question is: Is it possible to Google my web site but not show the Google query string or google.com as the referring site from someone's computer (for example behind a proxy server)?

I was thinking that maybe IE7+, because it has search providers built into the menu bar, might be the one that doesn't show the IP address by default as a privacy thing. Or maybe these are somehow persistent attacks from a spammer or hacker.

sample hits by IPDateIPhits7/15/200865.55.109.15517/15/200865.55.208.14817/15/200866.249.67.102187/15/200866.249.67.18567/15/200866.249.70.2617/15/200866.249.73.243444

Of course, I'd like to think something I have on my web site is really popular but I'd probably more likely think it's a bug in something I'm scripting or I should be disregarding certain hits that are really not hits.

Again, this just started two weeks ago and hasn't been a long term issue.

Maybe if someone can enlighten me on referring web site hit tracking I can make sense of it and adjust my hit counter scripting accordingly.

Thanks in advance.

Joe