I really should know the answer to this, as it is part of what I do for a living - web design & development... and the statistics portion of the puzzle too. But I don't.
When I have multiple tabs open, sometimes I see events that makes a tab seem as if it is reloading in the background (or maybe just parts of the pages) without being told to do so. I am not hitting refresh or F5, but every once in awhile it will say "loading" where it should show the page's title tag. It's observable in Firefox on CNN.com, Boston.com and some Grind.tv pages - I'm sure there are thousands more if I can rattle a few off the top of my head like that. If I could catch it in the act, I could maybe see what's happening, but I never catch it... I found a page that's doing it for sure, right now, which is why I am finally posting to ask about this technology.
It's definitely doing something like what I am talking about here on this page about a professional athlete's battle with an injury, and again it happens very quickly. I'm not sure if it's refreshing the whole page or just the following items:
-favicon, swap-in, swap out
-page title
-maybe H1
-definitely banner advertisements
Apart from the curiosity of how it's doing this,
I am even more interested in knowing if there have been cases where they are using these reload actions and are falsifying information about the visit. Is it as simple as a meta-refresh? I had no idea meta-refresh could work across whole minutes. Within the browser's process, is it instantiating a second visit, second session, or something else. Maybe I am trying to read tea leaves here but it's very distracting and makes me wonder what's going on in the background. And again, what are they doing with that data.
I've worked with some of these snake oil SEO consulting companies and heard their suggestions, but I've worked a few good ones too.
I've heard stuff like "this campaign will give you 10,000 impressions per month." It costs $XYZ dollars". Things really change when we're talking about ads being served on a page doing auto refresh stuff in the background and your target never sees the ad. Anyway.
I get the sense that it's not malicious, but only because it's happening on legit sites. If it was on some crap site I stumbled upon, I'd be saying "oh shit, should have upgraded to that Web Safety thing in Avast." In other words it seems shady, but I bet there's a reason to do it. Looking forward to any hints, and any answers. I've got nothing.
Thanks,
AA
EDIT: Wow that went long. Sorry.
I just sat with that athlete's page open, so that tab had focus (ruling out a theory I had that if the tab had focus, it wouldn't happen) and after about 2 minutes it did happen. I don't know what's going on. It doesn't blank the browser and reload everything, but it's definitely grabbing content and plopping it on the page - at the very least ads. Also the page has no meta-refresh code so it must be Ajax calls, right?