Website tracking refers to the act of archiving existing

websites A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education ...

and tracking changes to the website over time. Any applications exist for website tracking which can not be applied to many different purposes.

Website monitoring

Website monitoring allows interested parties to track the health of a website or web application. A software program can periodically check to see if a

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

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 dynamic web page is a web page constructed at runtime (during software execution), as opposed to a ''static web page'', delivered as it is stored. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application ...

, 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 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 spider ...

can periodically scan a website to see if any changes have occurred since its last visit. Reasons to track website changes include: * Enhanced automation: ** Triggering in

Event-driven programming In computer programming, event-driven programming is a programming paradigm in which the Control flow, flow of the program is determined by external Event (computing), events. User interface, UI events from computer mouse, mice, computer keyboard, ...

** Updating dependent automation (such as screen scraping 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 ...

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) needs to monitor mainstream websites as well as blogs. * ereleases.com provides a list of web press clipping services * Google Alerts and OnWebChange.com provide notifications when keywords are found in newly indexed web content * RSS feeds 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 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

) 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

{{Reflist Web archiving Network management Website management