Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog

Watching my logs is something I spend quite soem time doing. Seriously, if you want to

1. get an idea what to write about, or
2. see who linked to you, or
3. get an idea how to increase your traffic, or
4. 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…