Search Engine Spiders not tracked on my statcounter

[becky]

I have never once seen googlebot or yahoo slurp or any other spider recorded in my logs. I know that googlebot comes to my site every other day, because I can see fresh dates beside my site in the serps.

I'm sure that their IP addresses are recorded, but the actual "names" of the spiders never show up in my logs. Why is this?

I have talked to other webmasters who say they can see the actual name "googlebot" or "slurp" recorded in the stats pages.

[webmoriar]

StatCounter tracks browser activity and the search bots/crawlers do not trigger this so you only see actual visitors. You would have to check your server logs (if you have access) to see the bots.

Note: Some other tracker may work off of server activity but I have only used StatCounter so I don't know.

[becky]

Thank you so much...I didn't know this. Now how does someone access their server logs? And what software is available that I could see this?

[webmoriar]

Well since you have your own domain name you should be able to contact who is hosting your site and they should be able to tell you how to access your server logs. They can be read in any text editor as far as I am aware.