Does anyone know if hits by robots and spiders
trigger one's hit counter?
What is a hit counter? Or do you mean server logs?
If so, how do you determine how many hits were
actual people?
You have to understand that a 'spider' is the part of the search engine
that indexes your site. It passes by on its own time and takes a look
around. When a web user attempts a search at the search engine, the SE's
website presents relevant results taken from the database that the
spider filled earlier. From the SE's website, the web user enters your
site. What often distinguishes the spider from the human visitor, is the
so called User Agent string. A web user's browser also has such a
string, that it sends out with every request for a file from a webserver.
A typical one is for example:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Here is a search engine spider's string, from one of my client's stats:
htdig/3.1.6
Applications that analyse the logfiles of your webserver are often able
to show you the User Agent strings of visitors who passed by. Some of
those applications show how many human visitors came from a search
engine's website and sometimes also show what they were looking for.