Google recently unveiled their next batch of new services, including a technique called pre-rendering. The idea being that when a Chrome user runs a websearch on Google, the first few links will be automatically loaded in the background for instant display should the user choose to view it.

For those operating websites, this has a number of huge disadvantages. Firstly, those who monitor how many times their pages have been viewed (“hits”) are going to find their statistics are heavily skewed. A basic hit counter will not know the difference between an actual page-view and a pre-rendered page.

This could, of course, be very misleading when trying to identify which pages on your site regularly attract visitors.