I read somewhere—it might have been an article posted here on FR—about how to set up an automated system to “hit” the website. From the description, a single computer could give one of those websites thousands of hits. I believe the scheme involves a macro to reload the website after a fixed delay, which would register as a separate hit on the website.
I’m not a computer geek, so I’m not exactly sure how that would work, or if it would work.
I don’t think the number of hits discrepancy was due to any automated hits fraud...... let me explain about hit count. A site statistical report will tell how many “hits” there were to a page on a site (in this case the opening page). “Hits” is determined by how many files were loaded when the page opened. A page has many, many files (images, HTML code, functionality code like JAVA, PHP, ASP, etc, etc),CSS files for styling, includes (which are separate files that relate to content on all pages.... and the list goes on and on. So opening the home page meant multiple “hits” recorded on the stats report. You would have to look at “Unique Hits” to get the number of actual visitors.
This is a common mistake made by people who are not professionals in the field. But, then did we really expect the government to necessarily hire professionals when cronyism and kickbacks are the rule?