The Importance Of Website Traffic Referrer Logs
Referrer logging is utilized to allow web servers and web sites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or safety measures purposes. You can uncover which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.
By default, most hosting accounts don’t consist of referrer logs but might be subscribed for an additional monthly fee. If your web host does not give a graphic report of your log files, you possibly can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server utilizing free or low-cost FTP software, like these:
FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/ LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/ FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/
The log file is accessible on your web server which could be downloaded into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to generate a graphic report from your log files to ensure that the files are simpler to understand.
Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/ Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/ Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net
You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This info is very crucial to your company and marketing plans and isn’t advisable to neglect it.
In addition to identifying the search engine or linked website from exactly where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.
As referrer info can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer info. Proxy and Firewall software program can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private web sites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don’t send the correct referrer info, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target website itself as the referrer, which prevents these issues and still not divulging the user’s last visited site.
Since the referrer can very easily be spoofed or faked, nevertheless, it’s of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.