how to know which sites people link from?

brokenwings

I am quite new on this field. I wonder how I can know which sites people come from to my site(or so-called referal link). I didn't find that information in log file.

Thanks.

planetsim

a little thing that can help you maybe

http://www.php.net/manual/en/printwn/reserved.variables.php#reserved.variables.server and look this up 'HTTP_REFERER'

Rohan_Hill

Yup, $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] will give you the url of the page the user was refered from 🙂

the_Igel

And then you should write a snippet that stores these referers to db or a file, and include it into all your pages.
Or you can just parse your server logs: then you don't even need what $_SERVER vars are. A bit of RegExps, and that's all.

brokenwings

Can you tell me more how to parse server logs? thanks.

the_Igel

Here is a line of Apache log:

195.239.141.56 bdnr139.valuehost.ru - 
[26/Nov/2002:12:15:11 +0300] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 912 
"http://www.somewhere.com/linkToMe.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

First goes IP, from where the request came, then "-" - I don't know (something unknown? or just "-"? You can read in Apache docs). then request time. Then the request itself. Then status(200) and filesize(912 bytes). Then goes the referrer (if it's empty, then it is set "-" (with quotes)). And the last is UserAgent.

then regexp like
/(.+?) (.+?) (.+?) [(.+?)] "(.+?)" (\d+) (\d+) "(.+?)" "(.+?)"/
will catch all the fields in $1 - $9 respectively.

For details look [man]preg_match()[/man].