SEO Killer - Server Log Files

Author: Hossam Abdel-Kader

It is very important for every website owner to collect information about visitors, their behavior, how they move on the website, which interests the have and how long time they spend on which pages. Web servers collect those information and save them in log files. The most of hosting provider are offering software to report the visitor traffic on theire customer websites. If you have such application in use and you are interested in search engine optimization, this article may help you to avoid losing search engine positions or being banned.

A friend of mine had a website offering valuable information about human health. His website was till Febr. 2005 one of the best ranked sites the last few years. One month ago he started to complain about visitors fall although he didn't change his optimized search engine friendly concept. So we started to search for the possible reasons. His more than 40 keywords first positions were suddenly dropped from search engines results. It didn't need a long time to find out that his log files were all indexed in all of major search engines. After checking his log files I could find a plenty of links to websites dealing with medical products.

Some kind people can ask now ""What is the problem behind those links?"".. Yes it is a problem.. What would you say if I have a banned website and ask you to exchange links with me? The all of those Websites were banned from search engines with a grayed out PageRank value in Google toolbar. Did you know that a banned website can exchange links with you without your accordance? The only thing they have to do is to link to your website. If somebody clicks on this link, your server adds their url as a referer to the log files. Your report software shows the referer as a link to the banned website. Such scene can happen over night while you sleep.

Search engines such as Google don't make you responsible for links found over the web linking to your website. But they make you responsible for links found on your own website. If you link to a banned site, you risk to be banned too. If you have some luck your web site will be only punished by losing postions in the search engine results.

To avoid this risik, protect your log files by using a password, so that they can not be found or visited by search engine spider. If you can not do that, ask your hosting provider to do this step for you.

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