Webalizer Version 2.01 - Help me understand one point please...

What does ............. mean?

[flaxmac]

Hi there, thanks for checking my question. I am using Webalizer Version 2.01, it is provided by the host I use, so I dont have direct access to modify it anyway.

The section:
Top 20 of 21 Total Search Strings
shows very little action, but in my visits and hits I can see hundreds.

Can anyone help with the problem?
Clint.

[treeline]

Your question is a little unclear, but I suspect you're asking:

Why do logs show hundreds of searches but the stats show only 21 search strings?

Perhaps you are getting the same few searches over and over. This can happen if one search is really obvious, or if a search engine picks up one of your searches from a link somewhere, indexes, and serves it up on popular serps.

[dcrombie]

You probably need to update your 'conf' file with the search engine definitions:

SearchEngine alexa.com     q= 
SearchEngine alltheweb.com   query= 
SearchEngine altavista.com   q= 
...

[DerekH]

If by your question, which I had trouble understanding, you mean that you serve lots of pages but only get a few search strings, well, then that's exactly what's happening.

Visitors come to your site and get a page served in 5 ways....
1. By making lots of a small number of popular searches. You'll get 21 search strings, as you say you do...
2. By making one of a large number of popular searches. One of my site has about 1050 different search terms a month.
3. By links from other sites (check Webalizer's Referrers to find URLs not on your site)
4. By typing in the URL (from a paper advert, an email click, or a bot like Googlebot) - coming from no-referrer
5. By cliking a link on your own site.

The small site of mine I mentioned that gets about 1050 different searches a month also serves about 36,000 pages a month.
Most pages come from people wandering around the site. And that's good - that's satisfied visitors, exploring further!
DerekH