Google Analytics was showing normal pageview numbers, so we knew something was amiss. When we looked at the most viewed pages in awstats, it became obvious:

AWStats has always counted pageviews on the WordPress backend, but compared to the total pageviews the impact was negligible. However, now that WordPress 2.7 makes so many AJAX calls to admin-ajax.php (primarily for saving drafts), we must exclude these pageviews from our reports to leave meaningful data. Thankfully its very easy.

We’re going to instruct awstats to ignore hits on any page in the wp-admin directory. Alternatively, we could have AWStats ignore our IP address, which has its own merits, but this approach becomes cumbersome when multiple authors and dynamic IPs come into play.

Instructions:

1. Open the awstats .conf file which corresponds to your domain. On most shared hosting accounts this will be located in /tmp/awstats/. If you see more than one .conf file, choose the one which matches the domain of the site you are working on.
2. Look for the line which starts with:

   SkipFiles="

   AWStats is usually already configured to exclude robots.txt and favicon.ico, so the line probably looks like this:

   SkipFiles="robots.txt$ favicon.ico$"

3. Append the following string after the last filename listed (make sure to leave a space), but before the quote:

    REGEX[^/wp-admin/]

   If you’re file looks like mine, the line should now read:

   SkipFiles="robots.txt$ favicon.ico$ REGEX[^/wp-admin/]"

4. Save and upload the file. If you’re on shared hosting, you’ll want to CHMOD the .conf file to 444, otherwise your changes are likely to be overwritten.

That’s it! This change is not retroactive, but if all went well you should be able to write a new post in WordPress and the pageviews for admin-ajax.php will not increase.