Question re: HTTP Status codes

[Michael Snow]

I don't know much about this stuff. My 'daughter' in Romania put up my site.
My question is on my site statistics.
I only get about 300 'unique visitors' per month [except last fall when I ran an ad for a book]

So, in addition to 'unique visitors' the stats every month show something like this, too:

HTTP Status codes
HTTP Status codes* Hits Percent Bandwidth
404 Document Not Found 889 60.2 % 1.03 MB
301 Moved permanently (redirect) 572 38.7 %

Copy/paste messed the table up a bit...that is 889 hits w/ 404 and 572 hits w/ 301 code

And it has this footnote: * Codes shown here gave hits or traffic "not viewed" by visitors, so they are not included in other charts.

{Back in Nov when I had 2700 unique visitors the Http codes were:
301 Moved permanently (redirect) [hits] 2955 76.7 % 1.29 MB
404 Document Not Found [hits] 788 20.4 % }

Does this mean that that these 'hits' never found the site? Just wondering what this means [in simple terms].

Thanks

[bdh]

Firstly, it sounds to me like you have some pages that have permanent redirects because they no longer exist. For example, if you go to http://bibleforums.org/forum/ (which no longer exists), it redirects you to http://bibleforums.org/ (first with a 404 "not found" error and then with a 301 "redirect").

You generally have 2 main sources of 404 codes:

1. The page being referred to does not exists because you have broken links on your site.
2. Your site is being "probed" by hackers or bots trying to find files with known names that are know to be vulnerable to exploit.

This should also give you some pointers too on what other codes mean - http://webnet77.com/webstuff/server-response-codes.html

[Michael Snow]

Thank you for the info. I am not sure about the 'broken links' as my site has only one url and it has never changed. [mikesnow.org]. Only the home page is linked and other pages are found from the buttons there. The home page has been changed a couple times but never the url.

Are the number of hits likely to be consistent with bots?

[bdh]

Are the number of hits likely to be consistent with bots?

Probably some. For example, the google bot (and others) will look for files like robots.txt and sitemap.*

Browsers look for a file called favicon.ico (that's the "BF" image you see in your browser tab on this site for example)

Spammers of course look for other more nefarious things like ../../../etc/passwd (a hack attempt) or formmail.cgi (spam attempt)