How do you prevent gaming of page views?

Question

Say I have a site with pages. Pages are ranked based on the number of times they have been viewed. It is good for a page to be highly ranked because it will make it show up higher in my search results. Hence, the author of a page may try to game the system to increase that particular page's views.

So how do you prevent that while still keeping a quasi-accurate count?

I have come up with the following "scheme":

A user can only affect the page view once per session. This is what I would normally expect. If a user returns to the site later and views the page again, it should count as another page view.

The problem is that this makes the page view increment vulnerable to a script that clears its cookies before each request. The easiest solution to this problem would be to save the ip-address and only allow the same ip-address to increment page count once. This however has several major drawbacks; First of all, this would potentially take up a lot of storage, and second of all would prevent users on big LANs from incrementing page count. Lastly, a user cannot revisit a page and increment the page view more than once from the same ip. I can live with that, but would rather live without it.

The best method I can come up with off the top of my head would be to save the last X ip-addresses, and not let anyone from these ip-addresses affect the page view count. This would effectively stop any (simple) script from raising the page view count. Furthermore it would probably be a good idea to add a delay to the display of actual view count (basically keeping two counts and a datetime field for when the "display" count was last updated with the "actual" count, something I believe is done on the SE sites).

This is not a perfect solution, so I would be happy to hear your suggestions and/or comments.

Answer 1

Don't prevent: monitor and handle.

I would use a very different approach. Let the page views stay the same, but have reporting in place to looks for view-gaming. If a page gets gamed, you can find out who is responsible, give them a warning and a page-view penalty. If it continues, ban them.