Monitoring Your Site

One fact that can be very frustrating about being a webmaster is how many things occur without your knowledge. For example, your site is visited on a regular basis by dozens or even hundreds of different robots, each with it's own agenda. Unless you become a fanatic about examining your log files, you may never even know.

Another thing that happens naturally is your site may be added to link pages on other sites. You may never find out that this has occurred, as quite often you will not be notified. What happens is someone like your site so they link to it. This is not only normal but desired.

A couple of cool tools that you can use to monitor this kind of activity are listed below.

• The Informant - This great tool will monitor web sites and perform a regular search query for you. The second option is very valuable, as you can ask it to search for links to your site. For example, in the query box you could put "link:mysite.com" (where mysite.com is your site). This would cause the Informant to regularly see if there are any new links to your site.
• Tracerlock - Another excellent service which will perform daily searches for you. This is great to search for new links (although only Altavista is used) and for specified topics of interest.