Maybe this is known behavior or maybe it's emerging behavior, and I can have a closer look at what browser / OS combinations I'm seeing doing it, but I'm seeing in my logs where someone will hit one of our web pages (could be our landing page or some interior page, either one usually as a result of a google search). So there's the hit to the target html file, and then the next 2 or 3 files requested are html files that are referenced in (linked from) the first (target) file. Then all other files are requested that fully render the initial target page are requested. All of this happens during the same second (looking at the log time stamps).

When looking at the logs, I would normally sort out the miscellaneous files (gif's, js, etc) and just get a list of the html files the visitor went through to get an idea where the visitor went or how much interest they had. I was seeing a pattern of. say, index.html, file1.html, file2.html, file3.html from some (many?) hits, but when I had a closer look, all those html file requests happened during the same second, telling me it was their browser requesting them, not them clicking around to specifically get them.

So this adds another layer to web metrics and I wonder if this is known behavior. And - are their any commands I can put in the html code to direct browsers to not pre-cache html links. ?