If you're visiting this page, you're probably wondering why Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and Bloglines.com are listed as visitors in your Xanga Footprints!

Don't worry, these are not the names of actual people stalking you by visiting every page on your site! These are actually "search robots" (also called "search bots" or just "bots") which try to browse every link on the web. A search bot that visits a webpage will save the HTML of that page for processing by a search engine, so that users of various search engines can find your page with a search.

These search engines will visit your site- and thus appear in your Xanga Footprints - even if you've Locked your site so that people must be signed in to read what you've posted to Xanga. However, if a search engine visits a Xanga site with Xanga Lock enabled, the search engine will only see a short message saying that visitors must be signed in. So the search engine won't actually be able to see the content on your site.

Likewise, if you've set your Xanga to not publish an RSS feed, search engines can still visit that page and see a short bit of text explaining that there's nothing to see. In short, a visit by a search engine to your Xanga RSS feed will be listed in your Xanga Footprints, but your privacy has not been violated.