Learning from your blog's referrals

Digging around in the referrals to a blog can be quite educational, especially for the blog's author.

The referrals list shows the pages from which readers have arrived - pages with links to your site. The list is created from an analysis of the HTTP requests received by the server. Each request has an HTTP header, which can include an optional field called Referer [sic], used by the requesting browser to tell the server what the previous page was.

The referrals list can be particularly interesting to the author because it shows the search criteria that people used when finding a post through a search engine - this is included in the querystring of the referring page. Having access to these criteria allows you to run the searches again (by following the link in the list), which gives you access to other people's search results. If they've used significantly different criteria to you then you may well unearth new pages related to the subject matter that you might have missed when running your own searches.

The only problem with this is that, if you discover something new, you may need to update your original post...