Forum Moderators: DixonJones
My company uses WebTrends to track website information and statistics.
We have a website using .net that just has one page, main_form. When a user follows a link to another page, it hits a 404, but also tells the server to simulate a redirect to Main_form and create a page by combining other forms and controls, and then we put a fake URL in the URL bar. This works fine, but WebTrends just sees the 404 and logs that, it doesn't record the hits to the other pages. Is there any way we could imbed a javascript header or HTML Metatag to pass the fake URL along to Webtrends, so it records that page as being hit, instead of the 404?
Alternatively, and perhaps preferably, does anyone know of any alternative analysis software like Webtrends that can do this?
Thanks!
[edit- oops. I forgot to finish the subject line.. Oh well.]
The way your site is set up at the moment makes it totally unspiderable - bots such as Googlebot will see the 404 Not Found header and assume that the page does not exist. Your statistics program is seeing the same thing: all your pages are served with a 404 error code.
The way to fix this is to change your application. When the "fake" URL is called, the server will redirect the URL to the script. What the script should be doing is testing to ensure that there is relevant content associated with that fake URL, and return a 200 OK response, followed by the generated page. Only when there is no appropriate content, the script should return a 404.
Have you looking into using web beacons or page tags to generate your log data?
Larry
