• Dump the counter. Who uses counters nowadays?!
  
• Don't visit your own site and you won't affect the count...

When I first read this thread I remembered back almost ten years (1994) ... the last time I used a web counter. I had created a page that detailed how to overclock i486 CPU's. The page enjoyed relative popularity for its day. I installed the (then obligatory) vanity-counter, and watched its hits climb to over 150,000 in about a year's time.

At one point I thought...hmm, I'm skewing the number by periodically visiting the site to confirm site maintenance. But I quickly dismissed that thought, realizing that even if I hit the site 300 times, I was only skewing the hit counter by 0.2% (two tenths of a percent).

That was ten years ago, at a time when the number of internet users with web access was a drop in the bucket compared with today. Reality, practicality, and the proliferation of counter-skewing mechanised web-crawlers have all contributed to the virtual disappearance of web-counters from most websites (except those of the script-kiddies).

Given the fact that mechanized crawlers must generate a magnitude more hits on a popular page than the page's author possibly could (unless he had no life, or a mechanized page-hitter of his own), the few hits a developer might add to his counter have got to be insignificant compared to the counter hits contributed by all the other many sources out there. If, ten years ago, I was able to shrug off a few hits generated in the course of my page development, now, in 2004, one would have to be operating a pretty unpopular page to even have to think of the potential of his own hits skewing a total number.

If site popularity is an important thing to measure, get users to log in, and keep track of all sorts of related stats that way. Or set cookies and track them... that's one of the most common uses of cookies nowadays. But unless you don't mind that it's made inaccurate by web crawlers and other sources beyond your control, abandon the counter. It screams amature.