Webserver access log files

Usually all webservers records all processed requests into special file. This file is named as access log file. The location of this file and his format depend on the used webserver software and its settings.

For Apache based servers most frequently are used common and/or combined log formats. The Internet Information Server (IIS) use own, proprietary format of log files.

The content of log files also is various, but usually for every request includes the date and time of request, the address of remote host, name of requested file, code of request result, size of handled data. Also the log files may contains (and often contains) the referring URL and description of user agent.

The presence of such information allows to analyze the access log files to produce useful statistics.

Presence of referring URLs in log files allows to trace the sources of visitors of your site. And in particular, from what page of search engines. And due to that the address of search page includes also search phrase and page number, it's always possible to determine a position of your site for the given phrase.

Golden Phrases utility use this information to determine the most perspective search phrases