Search Marketing Arena is based on the same platform as other excellent Q&A sites such as StackOverflow, SuperUser and ServerFault. This is a really powerful and revolutionary platform that mixes together the best features from a wiki, a blog and a forum.

This means that Search Marketing Arena is different than other SEO focused discussion points such as Webmasterworld.com or Search Engine Watch. Off course, different doesn’t necessary mean better even if we would try to do our best to make the arena a nice place!

What makes Search Marketing Arena different is a user-focused project. Search Marketing Arena is absolutely free: no premium sections, no invitations required. You don’t need to register and you can ask questions or browse the site without an account.

If you decide to register, you can collect reputation and badges.

User list with badges and reputation

Badges are like medals. Badges are awarded automatically by the system depending on how you interact with the community. For example, you can gain a Student badge as soon as you ask your first question. You become a Supporter after your first vote.

Here’s a full list of available badges.

The list of available badges

The reputation is an other key feature. You gain reputation each time someone up-vote your questions or your answers. You also gain 15 points when your answer is accepted as the correct one.

Of course, if you don’t post good answer you might receive down votes too.

List of upvotes and downvotes

The higher is your reputation score, the wider is the range of features you have access to. Search Marketing Arena is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow users. Once the system learns to trust you, you’ll be able to edit anything.

For more information about Search Marketing Arena and all its features read the FAQ page. Search Marketing Arena is also available on Twitter.

Any feedback? Send us an email or write a comment here, we’re always looking for feedback, suggestions and also criticisms.

Still here? Visit Search Marketing Arena and ask your questions.

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You can easily identify the client IP address, the request timestamp, the landing page and the referral, in this example represented by a Google Search Page.

Creating a custom referer log file

As a Marketer or SEO, the referral and the landing page can be really useful information. Extracting them from the default apache log file can be a little tricky and requires some parsing knowledge. For this reason you would find more convenient to write a custom log file including only those two details.

Let me show you how. You don’t need to know much about Apache server management but you must have access to your virtual host configuration because the CustomLog and LogFormat directives can’t be specified in the .htaccess file but only at server config or virtual host level.
Write the following lines either in you Apache configuration file or in your virtual host definition depending on whether you want to create a referer log for all configured websites or just for a single virtual host.

In order to monitor incoming links you need to define a custom log format using the LogFormat directive and give it an useful name, for example referer.

Then ask Apache to generate a new log passing the custom format.

You can specify as many CustomLog as you want, already configured logs will not be affected. In this case Apache will generate two logs for each request: the first one with the default format and the second one including only the referral string and the landing page.

Here’s an example of a typical virtual host configuration.

For each request to example.com Apache will write an entry in the referer.log file including the landing page and the referer string, like the following one.

Combining LogFormat and CustomLog in a single line

If you don’t need to define a reusable LogFormat and you don’t care to assign it to a format name, you can create a custom log in one step.

The line above is equivalent to the following one.

Writing a CSV log file

You can customize the referer log placing as many “%” directives as you wish in your log format. For example, the following format writes a CSV log file.

Here’s an example.

Log entries can be easily parsed or opened with a CSV-compatible software like OpenOffice or Excel.

Logging external referers

Logging all referrals is expensive and not so effective for marketing analysis. It would probably be a good idea to restrict the directive to match only external referers. Enviroment Variables are what we need to do this.

First we set an environment variable called INTERNAL_REFERRAL if the request comes with a referer string matching current website domain. Then we define the LogFormat as usual and we enable the CustomLog only if the environment variable is empty, thus if the request matches an external referral.

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