The Importance Of Web Traffic Referrer Logs
Referrer logging is used to let web servers and web sites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You are able to understand which search engine they used to find your website 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 do not consist of referrer logs but may be subscribed for an additional monthly fee. If your web host doesn’t 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 using free or low-cost FTP program, 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 available on your web server which can be downloaded into your computer later. You may use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create 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 do not have the appropriate tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and isn’t advisable to neglect it.
In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from exactly where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.
As referrer information can occasionally violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer info, to avoid leaking the location of private web sites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their website to browsers that don’t send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these challenges and still not divulging the user’s last visited website.
Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, nevertheless, it’s of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.