'Old fashioned' hit counter - wordpress

I can't even believe I'm asking this but I've recently moved a client over from their old website platform, circa 2011 which had their blog on blogger - one of the features being a hit counter of pageviews or visits.
Everything is now on wordpress, and the client would still like to feature a similar style hit counter on the blog posts - there are plenty of plugins around for that however for his migrated blog posts he wants the hit counter to start at the previously recorded number. There's only about 24 blogs, so I can easily set each hit counter for those posts to start from there except, can I hell find a plugin.
This goes well beyond my knowledge, and wondered if anyone out there knew of a better approach?
Cheers,
Andy

Related

Lost all my sharing stats by purchasing a domain

I lost all the likes on my website on Wordpress then I bought the domain. It turns out that is the same site, but now no longer use the wordpress.com but .com (http://sobreasdeliciasdavida.com/).
Despite recent, my blog already had good statistics and the loss of more than 500 shares in Facebook brings my blog back to its beginning.
Can you offer the option of importing the likes to the new domain since the posts are the same?
Is there any way to do this?
Oftentimes when you move a well-established site, you'll want to set up a 301 redirect from the previous site. It's a permanent redirect that ensures that people following links to your previous site end up at your new one. I should point out, though, that your blog is far from taken back to its beginning. Remember, content is king, and you now have a site that's totally under your control and is already packed with great content, content that you know people respond to, like in social media venues, comment on, etc., etc. Don't worry about the 500 you might not get back because you certainly have thousands more on the way if you just keep doing what you're doing.
If you are directly using the facebook code in your website, then you can check this out. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2172926/maintain-social-shares-site-migration

Google Analytics says the source of most of my visitors is social-buttons.com. How are these visitors finding my site?

I'm not a really advanced Analytics user, so I've been trying to Google this, but haven't come up with a great answer. My analytics says 95% of my site visits to my blog today have come from site38.social-buttons.com and yesterday it was another subdomain of the same site. I visited social-buttons.com, but am unfamiliar with it, and have never deliberately put that code into my Wordpress site. I do have some plug-ins installed, which are "Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget", which displays my social media links, and also "Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons", which puts the like links on my posts.
My questions are, how are people finding my site through social-buttons.com? And are these quality hits?
Thanks, I appreciate any info!
This kind of visits are called Ghost Referrer Spam since they never reach your site. They use a GA weakness to make a fake visit and get a record in your data.
They do it to get traffic, people get curious to see who is visiting them and click on the link.
This specific Referrer Spam is nasty because it make multiple visits at the same time, is related to the number of the subdomain so if it says site38... it hits with 38 visits, I've also have many of these, here is a screenshot I took:
In my case is a different simple-share-buttons.com but is the same thing.
The easiest way to stop it is by making a filter for each spammer in your GA. Check this article to find more detailed information http://www.ohow.co/block-social-buttons-simple-share-buttons-referral/
As an alternative, you can make a more general filter to take care once and for all of all the Spammers by making a list of Valid Hostnames, this is more advanced and you have to be more careful. You can find more information about this solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
It's actually referral spam. Take a look at this https://www.mooresoftwareservices.com/Web-Commerce/social-buttons-com-referrer-spam
So unfortunately they are not good quality hits.

How To Safely Migrate From Wordpress To Non-Wordpress

I have a website that I made very quickly a while ago, using a WordPress theme. I completely forgot about it for a few months and checked the traffic for the first time today, and surprisingly it has been getting a lot of visitors and generated some income.
Currently the design is pretty horrible and I am 100% positive that if I re-design the website myself, I can get so many more visitors and conversions.
So I'm thinking about getting rid of WordPress and publish a new website using Bootstrap, and keep the same content and URL that I had.
But I'm scared that that would mess up my SEO and lose my organic rankings. I am on the first page of my main keyword and I would hate to lose this spot.
When a site goes through a design reconstruction, are there any specific steps that I should take? Should I just keep the WordPress site to be safe? Or am I worrying about something that won't even happen? I would love to hear any tips or feedback about this.
I have had recent experience of just this problem.
The URLs from the wordpress site are a commodity which is invested in search engine servers. Your ranking (which has taken time to accumulate) is in part dependant on preserving the URLs of the pages of your site.
You will ideally need to place a redirect (.htaccess file if using apache) from the old URL's to the new ones.
Rushing into commissioning a new site without reseaching this will cause you huge SEO loss that takes six months or more to recover from.
See this for more information.
Please take your time on this. I have too many companies call me on this when they screw it up.
Build out the new site on a test site that is not indexed, make sure it works, make sure the URL's are the same, test it.
Make sure you have a perfect htaccess file and I mean 100% perfect. Flip the new site on with the new and updated .hatccess file and the make sure your sitemap and robots.txt file are steller. Submit all of it to Google Webmaster and to Bing Webmaster Tools. If you change your URL's you are going back to the stone age. If you keep the URL's the same you will not see an issue.
-Matt

?wprptest=0, 1, 2, 3 ect at the end of all my URLs in google analytics

So I just received in about 20 minutes time 8000 hits on my site. I was watching this is google analytics real time.
All of the sudden, a page with 100 or so people on it, had a string appear at the end of the url like this.
website.com/page?wprptest=0 ( 100 active users )
I thought it was strange, then all the sudden it kind of went nuts, and i had 5 or 6 versions of the same page with different strings, like this...
website.com/page?wprptest=0 ( 100 active users )
website.com/page?wprptest=1 ( 80 active users )
website.com/page?wprptest=2 ( 20 active users )
website.com/page?wprptest=3 ( 23 active users )
website.com/page?wprptest=4 ( 43 active users )
Im running wordpress, and havent made any changes recently. I use Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, and cloudflare. I keep racking my brain but can't figure out where these came from. Anyone have any ideas? During this strange occurrence, I also received about 3x as much traffic as I normally do.
It has something to do with twitter/retweet of your link. That explain why yout traffic was increased.
I'm sorry i couldn't comment instead of awnsering it, because i can't tell you why, how, or where it started, but i can say that if you google ?wprptest=0 (as you probably did) you'll get only twitter results. The few non-twitter results are from posts that had their links copied from some tweet. You have any specific sharing plugin you use?
This comes with wordpress related post plugin and they seem to use it for testing there related posts on mobile phone and devices. They do that to improve the related post they show on you page and for tracking traffic I guess.
It seems to be good so don't worry. So, that you get 3x more traffic shows that it's working very good for you. For me it keeps the people on the website up to 15 pages a visit.
If you don't like it, you can just change the plugin.

New feed items not showing in Google Reader

There is a blog, powered by Wordpress, which has valid RSS feed (opens up fine in Safari), but doesn't show new posts in Google Reader. In fact, the latest article from Google Reader is from Jul 21, 2010, while the latest article on the blog dates to Aug 19, 2010.
What should I do about the RSS feed (escape characters? modify XML or what?) for it to work on Google Reader?
This is a reopened question, because the original question I found was migrated to superuser, then closed there because it is best fitted on stackoverflow, so no solution was ever provided, and no chance was given to do so. Please give it a chance to get answered.
Update:
Google Reader pulls new articles, in groups of 10, and not the latest. For example if 12 (or 13, or 11) new articles are not shown in Google Reader, when the next one is added, the oldest 10 (exactly 10) of these articles appear on Google Reader, and the date shown in Google Reader is equal for each article, as if all 10 were published in the same second - the second they appeared on Google Reader. This problem doesn't manifest itself in other aggregators that I've tried.
Update 2:
Articles started showing up regularly, so the problem is solved, temporarily. Why did it happen I don't know, maybe it's because more readers subscribed (for testing purposes), or it's because of the PubSubHubBub plugin that I've added recently. Until it becomes clear, and for 3 more days, this question remains open.
I just added the blog to my Google Reader and had a bit of a play. I noticed the same behaviour you observed where I was missing the 5 most recent posts and a bunch of about 10 of them all had the same date:
After doing a bit of a search on the web, I found this post which explains how you can actually view the Published date via a tooltip on the right-hand side:
Then once I click the "Refresh" button from Google Reader at the top, the new posts showed up:
I believe that high volume blogs that are on the Google spiders' radar would be indexed every few hours and therefore all posts would have their Received date very close to the Published date so nobody notices/cares that it is actually displaying the Recevied date.
For low volume blogs however, it seems the cache is updated much less frequently. Google has some tips to try to get it to update - Feed not updating in Reader. Maybe my subscription to the blog updated the cache, but as the spider has a delay I didn't see the updates till pressing "Refresh". Or maybe the act of pressing the "Refresh" button triggered it to look for new posts immediately.
Lastly I subscribed the blog to my wife's Google Reader account and this time the 5 latest posts came up straight away with matching Received times which translated back to about the time when I pressed the "Refresh" button (or maybe it was when I added the feed).
I feel your pain - I agree that it all seems a bit cumbersome for a low volume RSS feed ...
You may also check with the blog author / hosting company and see if they have turned down the Google indexing rate. Google can create high volumes of traffic on a site. Turning down the indexing rate (crawl rate) will help with that but it b0rks Google Reader.
As other posters have mentioned, it could also be a factor of low popularity / low page rank / something else causing Googlebot to fail to crawl the blog frequently enough.
Google Reader display is dependent on Google crawling the blog to pick up the latest content. Realistically, you'll want a client side pull of the RSS feed to get the latest data so you aren't dependent on Google crawling the website. Outlook 2010, Firefox, many others exist. The client side software will directly pull the updated RSS feed from the blog, capturing the posts as they are published to the RSS feed.
Thank you for your responses, I too have come up with some possible solutions (thanks to you).
I don't know whether It's something I did, or independent of that, but as from yesterday (when you answered to this question), feeds started showing up normally.
Maybe it is due to the fact that thanks to you the blog got more subscribers on Google Reader and the Update Rate bounced (just like #Bermo suggested).
Or, maybe the introduction of the PubSubHubBub plugin changed something. But it's rather the first variant (number of subscribers). Though it is still a mystery why other extremely unpopular blogs give me regular articles in Google Reader.
For now I will only upvote good answers, until everything becomes clear (can't really determine the exact cause) or until the last day of this bounty.

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