The other day, Google announced a feature built into Chrome named pre-fetching. It isn't new but Google is talking about it again and it is scaring webmasters.
To best describe what it does, see this short video:
Why is this scaring webmasters? Simply because it can skew the web analytics.
A WebmasterWorld thread shares some of those concerns. Here are some quotes:
Now this is going to create fake hits on web servers without any real visitors...
It will be interesting to see how this ties in with google analytics..
You'd have to assume Google Analytics would handle this fine, but other packages?
What about data plans and bandwidth charges?
Either way..how it is set up now..it is the site owner and the end user are the ones actually paying for this "Google feature"..both are paying the bandwidth or the data charges ..and for a "benefit" that we only have Google's word the visitor actually wants ..most pages ( unless they are running Google's own slow analytics codes etc ) load fast enough for every one.
Are you concerned? Personally, I am not.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
