It’s true – the best way to understand and be sure what activity happens on your website is to open the logfiles. You’ll find a lot of activity which is good for your cause, such as search engine spiders and real human visitor activity, and you’ll find abuse such as hacker attacks and content theft. Blogger Eric Lander wrote this thorough post which introduces log file analysis to webmasters and SEOs.
This Wikipedia entry provides a most complete list of server log analysis tools, but remember, to get started looking at logs, all you really need is a good text editor. Even Notepad works in a pinch.
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