Watching your logs
Watching my logs is something I spend quite soem time doing. Seriously, if you want to
- get an idea what to write about, or
- see who linked to you, or
- get an idea how to increase your traffic, or
- get an idea how to get your stuff indexed and/or increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site, etc., etc. -
you should check your stats.
I’m not the only one saying this. Check out this post by GrayWolf, especially the comment that goes with it…
I don’t even mention that checking your stats can remind you to fix the problems like non-existent 404 page or robots.txt. Server logs can even reveal search engine secrets before they announce things officially - pay attention to user agents and they can tell you a lot. For example, alongside with the usual
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
you may sometimes notice something like
Yahoo-Blogs/v3.9 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/crawling/crawling-02.html )
or
YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 1; views 3)
(a very informative one - this one even tells you the number of people subscribed to your blog’s feed) or even
YahooFeedSeeker Testing/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide)
- this last one, in particular, letting you know of Yahoo testing some new feed crawler…