AVG recently bundled a new tool with their AVG 8 Antivirus software, called LinkScanner. This program automatically scans links that you MIGHT visit. For example, if your Google search reveals 10 results, LinkScanner will visit them all. Not only does this skew the websites hit counters and visitor reports, but it also increases the bandwidth used by the site, costing the sites more money each month. Although this hasn’t majorly affected us yet, it is starting to add huge costs onto smaller websites running bills.
Not only does this cause problems for the website owners, one user of the new software has reported LinkScanner downloading nearly 900MB of extra data in one day. This is a huge problem for Capped Broadband users, as it uses valuable download usage.
Furthermore, LinkScanner visits the site just as a browser does. This means there is no way to filter out the robotic clicks to gain accurate visitor numbers.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:56 am
There’s more information, particularly of interest to webmasters, at http://www.avg-watch.org
July 5th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for the heads up on this one.