title: Hit counter for my webpage: Safety checks
body: <p>The basic idea is pretty simple; keep some sort of database of the records and increment the Counter field in the <code>Page_Load</code>. So far so good. However, I'm trying to think a bit further: What checks should I place in my <code>Page_Load</code> to prevent exploitation, such as bots, that try to artificially increase the hit count? A very good example of this is StackOverflow itself. You'll note that views count of your question doesn't increment every time you refresh the page, so they have some sort of intelligence working behind it, right?</p>
  
  <p>So what are the basic checks I should place? Here are some ideas:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Block duplicate request from the same IP address in a small period of time.</li>
  <li>Blacklist a few static IPs such as Google crawlers.</li>
  <li>Maintain a list of visited pages in current user's session (this is easy to decieve I guess).</li>
  </ol>