To all you web masters out there (and "code" husbands included

Can anyone suggest a well written, informative article for the beginner on reading and understanding your access logs? From the research I've done it looks like the spiders/crawlers have been hitting me BIG time lately. I had 167 hits yesterday and only 7 at the most appeared to be natural hits(two from VAF directory, thank you very much!). I can identify goggle.bots, yahoo's (slurp) and msn.bots but I'm looking for an in depth overview.

Thanks in advance.

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Dawn Lawson | At Your Service
http://freelanceadminsupport.com

Please clarify where your access logs are?
Are you looking at latest visitors in your cPanel?

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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein

I'm curious too - Dawn, every webhost has their own way of displaying the info but usually there's the visitor's IP address, their OS (operating system), the page they entered on, any pages they visited during their stay, the page they left from and some other notes that really don't much matter...

Have you considered installing and learning Google Analytics? The info it can give you is superior to even cPanel's stats and can really give you a nice detailed overview as well as intricately detailed pieces of info about your site and how users interact with it. Here's a quick how-to in case you need help installing it.

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I am looking at my web hosting control panel. Tess, yes that's what it looks like. Here's an example:

97.101.215.153 - - [15/Jun/2008:08:08:02 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 8537 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)" "www.freelanceadminsupport.com"

Maybe learning Analytics should be considered! I have an analytics tool available right there on my web hosting cpanel. I'm just now learning how to navigate my way around there and am trying to learn the ins and outs.

I have recently submitted to online directories and major search engines. They have been crawling me like CRAZY! But I also see some spammy type websites (Funwebproducts, favicon) crawling my site (I think ) I will block them in a robots.txt once I figure this all out. I just need to get a better grasp on reading this stuff. I'll see if the analytics helps at all, thanks.

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Dawn Lawson | At Your Service
http://freelanceadminsupport.com

97.101.215.153 = users IP address (if you want to know where they are located you can search Google for an IP lookup tool - but Analytics will tell you all of this and more, just in a different format)

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 = info about the user's OS - so let's say you know your site doesn't view properly in Safari - you can use these to see how many people come to your site using Safari and how often, etc. to help you determine if you want to work out the bugs so it views properly (again, available in Analytics and then some...)

The URL shows which page they entered your site on.

I have never blocked a crawler, unless Hamid has done so and I'm just not aware - we *have* blocked entire IP addresses in certain parts of the world when we noticed attempts at hacking, etc. but there's no real reason that I can think of to stop anyone from crawling your site (unless they're scraping content, but that's more an issue with blogs...)

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Thank you for the explanation Tess. I appreciate your time.

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Dawn Lawson | At Your Service
http://freelanceadminsupport.com