Introduction To Website Traffic Analysis With Webalizer

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Introduction To Website Traffic Analysis

Understanding Webalizer Reports

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• The webalizer report shows the traffic for the last year for a website
  • Most important column is the Daily Avergage of Visits. Several pages viewed by one person (or search engine) within a half an hour are counted as one visit.
  • Pages is a count of every access to the site including graphics, HTML files, etc. One web page containing references to 10 graphics, would count as eleven hits when someone browses to the page.
  • Hits may be even higher than pages because there are HTTP commands that access a website without actually reading a page, for example the HEAD command to see when the last update was to a webpage.
• Month by month statistics are useful to recognize overall trends and to compare performance over time
• Month view of Daily Statistics, focus on the number of visits each day.
• Hourly usage for a month on a mature site usually shows a standard double bell curve: Highest accesses during the work day in the US, a dip during commute time home, and a smaller increase during the evening hours, with the lowest traffic being 1am to 5am (PST)
  • The hourly usage graph may not shopw this bell curve if the site is not getting a lot of traffic, either because it is new, it is not properly indexed by search engines, or it's traffic has been damaged (for example by being dropped from search engines)
• Total URLs shows the top pages being accessed
  • /robots.txt may be a top URL in the Total URLs. This page is accessed before everytime a well behaved web spider accesses your site. The /robots.txt file can be used to tell robots that certain sections of website are off limits, and should not be accessed. This can be used to keep certain content out of the search engines. Spiders can be excluded by name. Some spiders, however, ignore this file.
    • http://mysleepcenter.com/robots.txt shows trying to block the robots from accessing any URL starting with /words/, or /bible/ and also to block a bot called Turnitinbot, which is from a service that tries to help professors identify if their students have plagarized content from the internet. Since we dont' care about wasting bandwidth to help these professors, and most importantly the turnitinbot sends no real visitors because of it's indexing, we try to block it from accessing the site.
  • When several subdomains are combined on one site, the webalizer stats are the aggregate stats of all the subdomains. This might make it difficult to tell which subdomain is actually getting the traffic.
  • Comparing January 2004 (good traffic) and July 2004 (after severe fall off) for MySleepCenter?Create|Search: Notice what is missing in July. All of the bookstore style page names, n_ISBN... and b_ISBN.... are missing. Since all those were on the the bookstore.mysleepcenter.com subdomain, it seems to have been dropped from the search engines.
• Top Entry and Exit pages shows the most popular pages that people are first using to visit your site.
• Total sites gives you an idea of the most common visitors to your site. Typically these will be robots like craler14.googlebot.com
• Total Referers shows you who is sending your traqffic.
  • Comparing Mysleepcenter.com again for January and July 2004, notice that in July Yahoo is missing, and visitors from google have fallen by 80%. MSN is also missing.
  • Looking at November 2004, we see improved traffic and some books again in the total URLS list, more traffic from google, but none from MSN or yahoo. We also see www.porno-hackerz.com which is an example of referer spam, where someone runs a spider that makes fake hits on sites in order that they will appear on the top list of referers. If the webalizer page happens to be indexed by Google, google could give them page rank for their link on the referers page.
    • Searching google to see if this is in google, "Total Referrers" site:mysleepcenter.com shows no responses.
  • Notice that in July and November, there are hits coming from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Debt which is an article I wrote and linked to the mysleepcenter website. In November about 140 visitors probably came to the website after reading the article.
• Total Search Strings - This shows the kinds of phrases that people are using in search engines to find out about the website to come and visit.
  • Try searching for some of the top phrases in the Total Search Strings report to see where a website is positioned for these searches.
  • Look at a top phrase that used to generate traffic on an older report, but no longer does. This may indicate that some new pages that more specifically target these phrases need to be developed.
  • oldphrase site:yourdomain can be used to see if Google still knows of any results for your website for a phrase that used to generate traffic.
  • On Chat11 webalizer report, notice Phil Henry is a top term. It is an example of using a misspelled word or name to attract traffic.
• You can visit the webalizer website for more information: http://www.myunix.net/webalizer/

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