404, Aliases and shUrls usage

If enabled using the settings under the Data recording tab of sh404SEF configuration, additional data becomes available in the 404 requests manager, in the Aliases manager and in the shURLs manager. The former will let you pinpoint where 404s are coming from and whether you should act upon them. The 2 latter elements will let you know if and how the 301 redirects you have setup on your site are used - or not.

The referrer information tells you on which site and page a visitor clicked on a link to arrive at your web site. The referrer will be missing if visitors directly type your site URL into their browser address bar.

If your site is not running under HTTPS, you will also miss many referrer information. By default, browsers will not pass referrer information from an HTTPS site to another one that is simply HTTP.

Here is how it looks on the shURLs manager. Looking at the k3 shURL, we can see:

From there, we can already see that the k3 short URL was used 5 times. There's probably some more data available. Let's click on the + button:

This detailed view popup tells us that this shURL was once directly requested by a user (typing it in the address bar of their browser probably, or maybe coming from an HTTPS site which hides as a referrer), and a second time coming from our own site, on the /joomla/samples-sites page.

You also get information on the requester IP address and user agent. You can perform searches against the referrer or the user agent.