I have been watching my server traffic logs a bit over the last week or two. They are normally interesting to view once in a while, but I pay more attention to Google Analytics for my actual traffic reports.

I do think that Google misses some traffic, but most of the missed traffic probably shouldn’t count anyway. I think that there are people that hit the page and bounce before Analytics realizes they are there. Google instructs to place the code at the bottom of the page just before the body closing tag. That means that the Google script will be the last thing read when the page is rendered. The code is javascript, and as such could be placed in the head section of the page. It would be read before the page is actually rendered in that case and catch more of the flash thoughts.

At any rate, the information that I pick up from the logs tells much more about the server activity. In the server logs you see all of the activity of the web crawlers and spiders. There is a lot of robot activity that mostly never shows in Analytics because the pages are not actually opened, just downloaded to the indexing server.

On my blogs I also see some other traffic that does not show up in analytics. These are the tracks of the comment spammers. I have come to the conclusion that there is a list somewhere of direct addresses to comment pages of blogs. These comment spammers come in through the back door directly to the comment page. They leave their spam comments without ever reading a post or visiting the actual blog. Probably some or most of these are automated. They all leave their tracks in the server log.

This blog has now been hit over 6,000 times with comment spam. I don’t have to deal with most of that because my anti-spam software dumps many of them directly. It does leave a few for my decision. In most cases I choose ‘delete permanently’ but if there is some relation to an actual post I occasionally approve one.

I have recently posted a comment guideline page on all of my blogs. That will not make any difference to the comment spammers, but the fact that the page is there makes me feel better about deleting the spam.

Blog commenting is a viable way to attract traffic to a site if it is done properly. Comments must be real and address the subject of the post. They need to add value to the post. Too many people just post something quick like “great post” and are off on their merry way. These type of comments add no value to the post or the blog, and are seldom likely to drive any traffic to the posters address.

Do you have problems with comment spam? Do you ever look at your server traffic logs? Leave a ‘quality’ comment.