Forum Moderators: phranque
Since the logs are in the root, they can be read by the spiders, although there is not link from the actual site to the logs.
Does anyone think that having these logs in the root is taken into the search algorithyms and affects the indexing, page rank or SERP?
Just a concerned webmaster....
Even if there are no links to the logs, it's possible that they might get picked up by the SEs. I've seen too many stories of supposedly un linked to pages appearing, whether because of toolbars, or whatever. Do you really want your client's traffic stats available on the web (or to a competitor)?
A favorite technique of black hat spammers is referer log spamming, where they fake a referring site so that if the log is picked up by the SE's, they get a link.
Moving the location of the logs to a different directory (and then password protecting that directory) is fairly easy to do, and would probably be considered 'best practice' by most webmasters. Or, if you don't access your logs via a web browser, move them to a location available through FTP, but not the web.
HTH
