Website tracking refers to the act of archiving existing websites and tracking changes to the website over time. Many applications exist for website tracking which can be applied to many different purposes.

Website monitoring

Website monitoring Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected. Website monitoring are often used by businesses to ensure website uptime, performance, and functionality is as exp ...

allows interested parties to track the health of a website or web application. A software program can periodically check to see if a website is down, if broken links exist, or if errors have occurred on specific pages. For example, a web developer who hosts and maintains a website for a customer may want to be notified instantly if the site goes down or if a web application returns an error. Monitoring the web is a critical component for marketing, sales and product support strategies. Over the past decade transactions on the web have significantly multiplied the use of

dynamic web page A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how the assembly of every new web page proceeds, and includin ...

, secure web sites and integrated search capabilities which requires tracking of user behavior on web sites.

Website change detection

Website change detection allows interested parties to be alerted when a website has changed. A

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...

can periodically scan a website to see if any changes have occurred since its last visit. Reasons to track website changes include: * Enhanced automations : ** Triggering in Event-driven programming ** Updating dependent automations (such as

screen scraping Data scraping is a technique where a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. Description Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using data structures suited for automated processi ...

programs) **

Link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address o ...

mitigation ** Change trend monitoring * Triggering human actions : ** Analyst classifications ** Updating documentation ** Competitive monitoring ** Compliance monitoring ** Enforcement monitoring ** Investigation monitoring

Web press clippings

This is a parallel application to the offline business of press clippings. For web press clippings, a crawler needs to scour the Internet to find terms that match keywords the clipping service is looking for. So for instance, the Vice President of the United States may have staff looking at web press clippings to see what is being said about the Vice President on any given day. To do this, a web press clipping service (aka

Media monitoring service A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include ...

) needs to monitor mainstream websites as well as blogs. * ereleases.com provides
list of web press clipping services
*

Google Alerts Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user' ...

and OnWebChange.com provide notifications when keywords are found in newly indexed web content *

RSS feed RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

s can often be used in this case since these are the areas in which relevant content will be found.

Website archiving

This type of service archives a website so that changes to the website over time can be seen. Unless archived, older versions of a website cannot be viewed and may be lost permanently. Fortunately there is at least one web service (see

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

) that tracks changes to most websites for free. Past information about a company can therefore be gleaned from this type of service, which can be very useful in some circumstances.

References

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External links

Internet Archive, nonprofit organization
Web archiving Network management Website management