AVG, once seen as one of the best free anti-virus software packages on the market is now a webmaster's nightmare. Some of you may be aware that the latest version of AVG (version 8) comes with a new feature called Link Scanner. Link Scanner pre-scans links on a web search results page to determine whether they are safe to visit. What seemed a good idea to start with soon turned into a fairly large issue.
Early on, we noticed problems with using the link scanner when our internet connection started to suffer noticeably. The link scanner on all machines in our office was causing considerable bandwidth usage and slowing our internet connection down. We were quick to turn this feature off. Little did we realise at that point another problem lurked around the corner which was to be a webmaster nightmare.
With an estimated 20 million users worldwide using AVG 8 and a possibly 50 million users still to upgrade, webmasters are faced with the giant problem of fake traffic. These pre-link checks are skewing web logs all over the world by creating traffic statistics that aren't real human traffic.
Thankfully AVG have seen the light and have provided an update that turns off the Link Scanner. For those of you who have not yet installed version 8.0 please do so. An up-to-date virus scanner is a useful tool.
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