Reliable Way to get Unique Hits to an Article

Question

Hello, I am using asp.net C# and looking for a reliable way to get genuine unique human hits to articles. My goal is to not count a hit if its a bot or non human visit. Anyone, that is blocking cookies or don't have cookies activated the hit should not count.

I am afraid that someone may try to rig hits on an article by sending a bunch of bots to the an article with different ip addresses and deleting cookies for each visit. Also, if a search engine bot shall visit the article the hit should not count.

Is there a reliable way to do this?

Answer 1

I found lots of interesting looking pages when I searched for "determine if visitor is a bot". But in reality I suspect this is a constantly changing front line.

Also you may want to ask this question on meta.stackoverflow.com as well to see how they do it here (if they do).

Answer 2

what about NoBot Control?

Answer 3

Google Analytics does differentiate between "visitors" and "search engines". I don't know exactly how they do, but if it's an option for you, you can implement GA on your site and use it for counting hits on the articles.
If using GA directly is not an option, maybe the javascript file that you reference when adding GA to a page gives some clues on how to obtain your desired results.