Monthly Archives: February 2009

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Tracking URL referer in Google Analytics using #

Google Analytics v2.0 by vrypan.

When you need actively to track where your visitors are coming from – say because you are running several campaigns – you need to now where your visitors are coming from. No, seriously, it DOES matter. 🙂

The “normal” way to do this is to add some parameters to the URL. Like e.g. myrurl.com/?track=siminar_url 
The downside of this is that the URL then is seen as a new URL by the seach engines (Google in short). This triggers dublicate contect filters since you can basically find the same stuff on 2 or more different URLs.

One solution is to use the new canonical tag : https://webhaj.boostme.dk/canonical-tag-state-your-canonical-url/

But an easier one is to use the # (called hash or pound sign), since this is basically seen as an internal link on the same page and the seach engines therefore just ignores this!

To have Google Analytics track these you need a little hack provided by Avinash Kaushik. Use this JavaScript:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1"); 
// Solution for domain level only
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.pathname + "/"
+ document.location.hash); 
// If you have a path included in the URL as well 
pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location.pathname
+ document.location.search + "/" + document.location.hash);

Read more on: http://janeandrobot.com/post/URL-Referrer-Tracking.aspx – scroll down to “URL Fragment”

And: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

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Track your (stolen) cell phone

Remote TrackerI have found this great little piece of software, which you can install on you cell phone and then if it stolen, you can track it just be sending an SMS (text message) from another phone and recieve the coordinates of your phone back. I even works when the thief have replaced the sim cards with the added bonus that you will recieve the new number and owner information along with the GPS position.

The is just great! Of course you need a GPS enabled phone to use it.

I can even think of some other great uses, e.g. hiding a small phone in you childs luggage or bag, and then always be able to track them. Or why hiding it, just give them a GPS enabled phone and track your childrens position whenever you want. 🙂 Big brother is watching your every step! 😉

Check it out: http://www.mobiletopsoft.com/board/2935/freeware-remotetracker-for-pocket-pc-devices.html

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Canonical tag – state your canonical URL

Dimostrazione che i contenuti duplicati di Blogger / Blogspot escono nelle SERP by notoriousxl.

Great news for all of us struggeling to make sure that dublicate content filters are not activated (since we all know that this is really important for SEO).

Google, Yahoo and  Live (Microsoft) is now supporting the new a new canonical tag, which states which URL is “the right one” for every single page onm a site.

E.g. if one of my pages can be accessed via https://webhaj.boostme.dk/?p=3 as well as via  https://webhaj.boostme.dk/canonical-tag-state-your-canonical-url/– one of them will trigger the dublicate content filter. Chances are that the page filteret is not the one I would be prefer to get filteret. And if users access both pages and links both pages my SEO is hurt too, since the 2 URLs split all the link juice that should have been collected by the 1 page..

All I need to do now to make the search engines use the URL that I prefer is to add a tag like this on the page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoast.com/twitter/analytics/"/>

Our friend Joost de Valk have already made some plugins to handle this easily – including for Drupal and WordPress: http://yoast.com/canonical-url-links/