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I've wanted to apply google analytics on my music page at www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandid=976533
But I am unable to use that URL as my default on analytics because it contains a query.
I have a Domain URL at www.SilentNoizeMusic.com that forwards to the above address, but I'm questioning if using the www.SilentNoizeMusic.com url as my default on Analytics will actually track the stats for the real site.
Are my suspicions correct?
If so, is there any sort of workaround, like a modification to the original URL that could bypass the query error but still direct to the same page to be tracked?
(as a side note, I'm not sure how relevant it would be to any potential answers, but the music hosting site I'm using does not allow javascript, which is what initially prevented my from using analytics since I couldn't paste the tracking code. I have found a workaround that I want to test out, but I just need to fix the above problem in order to do so.)
Thanks
If you are using domain forwarding provided by your DNS server, then no, Google Analytics won't be able to track stats of visitors who reach your soundclick.com page via your SilentNoizeMusic.com URL.
Some DNS providers offer a "domain cloaking" option, which makes the destination page appear in the browser at your SilentNoizeMusic.com URL. All this is doing is returning an HTML page containing an iframe that loads the destination page. Cloaking is a terrible hack and not very reliable, since any link clicked on in the destination page (inside the iframe) will cause the browser to navigate to the destination page anyway.
Another approach might be to try to embed a trackable item in the destination page. You said that soundclick.com doesn't allow you to embed javascript; do they allow you to embed HTML?
Option 1: See if you can embed an iframe in the html of your soundclick.com page. Point the iframe to an html page on some other web server that you have control of, and put your javascript and google analytics stub in there. The javascript won't violate the 'no javascript' mandate of soundclick.com, because it won't be executing in the context of soundclick.com - it will be sequestered inside the iframe. The iframe doesn't even have to be large enough to show on your soundclick.com page. Just having it there will be enough to get the sequestered page to load, and that's all that Google Analytics really needs. You won't get any stats about what the user is doing on the soundclick.com page, and you won't get any referal data (what sites contain a link to yours that users clicked on to get to your site) but you should get full stats about number of visitors, new vs returning, etc.
Option 2: If soundclick.com doesn't allow you to put an iframe HTML element on your page, will they allow you to reference an image on another server? Again, set up an image file (preferably small) on a server you have control of and place an link on the soundclick.com page referencing the image on the other server. You can then collect request stats on the image file, which will give you some small degree of traffic measurement. This is what the old-school hit counters did, basically.
Related
I have GA on every page on one domain (actually not me, but my company, whose programmer needs auditing). Just the default code (Classic version, ga.js), no special accommodations whatsoever that I've seen or know of. Bare minimal if any configuration past registering the service with the main site...
All the pages are either aspx or static HTML. It's common practice for this guy to embed pages on the site within other pages on the site in iframes, where both the parent (top-level) & child (embedded) pages contain the GA script.
I don't really know much at all about GA, have never worked with it, but I do suspect that might result in extra hits being counted by GA or something, that that may be messing with the metrics. But then I've read stuff about GA using first-party cookies so by default pages loaded in iframes won't be tracked/counted... I could really use some clarification on this, please.
Then our programmer frames pages from the main site in pages on other sites that we own, that are on different domains. So then there's this cross-domain business, with no segregation of sources, because they really don't care much. So what should be the outcome of that? The external sites' pages don't have the GA code.
However, we're rebuilding one of those other sites - actually I am, for the most part - and the programmer told me to just copy and paste the same exact GA script used on the main site into that one. So, it's a different domain. That wouldn't work as-is, would it? Wouldn't there have to be some sort of special configuration, setting of the domain, something?
I'd really appreciate if someone could tell me more about the scenarios described above. Thanks in advance.
In the Google Analytics developer menu, you can create a new 'profile' for this new site. The analytics will then be tracked for just that one site, not for all. In theory, it is possible to use one GA.js for all your sites, but it kind of kills the whole concept of Google Analytics, so it's not recommended.
Your really shouldn't be using iframes anymore IMO. There are reasons to use them like embedding code for tracking etc, I think, even GA uses iframes. But, generally Google doesn't like them because a lot of spammers use them to try and fool the Google Crawler.
Also, it get's very complicated to understand what is going on within GA.
To answer your question: Each iframe is like an independent webpage completely separated from the other webpage (for security reasons). So when Google or a web browser goes to your website it will do this:
Load your main html document.
Render that page.
See that you have an iframe.
Load that page in the iframe.
Render the iframe.
Now, if you don't have GA installed on the iframe page it will not track the page being loaded.
But if you do put GA in the iframe it will record when the iframe is loaded or the webpage is loaded.
But, remember that one of the main reasons of having GA is to see where your customers are coming from and why. If you have an iframe of another webpage, you really don't know if that is because a customer is:
A) visiting your website from the page directly.
OR
B) the customer is visiting that page through an iframe on another page.
It can get very complicated
You must generate a new tracker for each domain you are using. Otherwise what is to stop someone from just copying your GA code, and putting it on their webpage.
Hypothetical Situation: I have a small obscure website called "miniatureBoltsInCarburetors.com" which provides content about the miniature bolts which hold a carburetor together as well as some general related automotive information. My site also has a single page which allows someone to find the missing bolt in their carburetor, and while no one will access this page directly from my website, one billion other popular automotive sites have embedded this single page in their website using an iframe, yet not included a link back to my site.
I recognize that this question is related to SEO which is considered off topic, however, all of the many SEO related forums discuss the marketing steps one could take, and not the programming steps or strategies, and hope others will allow this question to be answered here.
I wish my site "miniatureBoltsInCarburetors.com" to be ranked high for general automotive searches. What could I do to allow the 3rd party sites which include an iframe back to my site to improve my ranking? Could using JavaScript in the iframe to create a link on the parent page provide any value? What about when my server renders the page, use PHP to get the referring URL from $_SERVER, and include it in the content?
I am providing a solution here. Not sure if this is what you want though.
In your page which is used by other websites in iframe you can put below Javascript. This javascript checks if the webpage is opened inside an iframe or directly in browser.
So using this check when you see it is opened in an iframe. On click on something navigate to your website.
// This works in all browsers
function inIframe () {
try {
return window.self !== window.top;
} catch () {
return true;
}
}
Also for your reference you can check the below URL.
How to prevent my site page to be loaded via 3rd party site frame of iFrame
Hope it helps.
Iframes are seen seperate pages by Google. Your approach may end up being penalized due to being sourced from untrusted site. According to Google Webmaster Support
Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't
correspond to the conceptual model of the web. Google tries to
associate framed content with the page containing the frames, but we
don't guarantee that we will.
One of the best approaches to rank higher for a specific keyword is, make multiple related sites. In your case a 3-4 paged site about carburetors, bolts, other things your primary site contain would do it. These mini sites will be more intense about the subject due to less page count. Of course they should contain unique articles on each page. Then link from mini websites to primary websites and you can see the dramatic change.
In fact, the thing you are trying to do was a tactic to rank competitors down worked occasionally a few years ago. Now, it is still a risk.
I see. You don't want to mess up the page for your own site, but you want to do something with all the uncredited embeddings.
The solution is fairly simple:
Create a copy of the page.
Switch your site to use the copy.
Amend the version that countless other sites are embedding, so that there is a small link back to you. Or, add an iframe blocker script that will load your site.
If the page is active (ie user interacts with it to find the missing bolt) you could include a sales message with the response encouraging the user to visit your site.
I think that your goal is getting your link onto these other sites long enough to get indexed by Google before it is noticed by the people doing the embedding, so it's a bit of a balancing act.
I see conflicting advice about how Google indexes iframes. You should use a PageRank checker to see if the existing iframe page url has PageRank, and compare it to the page that you embed it on.
I dont Think you need to worry ,.
Google bot does seem to crawl through Iframes ,but the Web-Page Containing that Iframe is not Credited for that Content .. In other Words,, Page-Ranking of that particular Web-Page do not Change due to Contents from Iframe .
is IFrame crawled by Google?
Do robots crawl iframes?
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I have studied most of the posts concerning web page being viewed in an iframe here but I was wondering if this can hurt the SEO of the framed site! I own a niece blog, lets call it mynieceblog.com and I recently found out that my web content, mynieceblog.com/mypostname.html, is viewed in an iframe by a site acting like a blog aggregator. A toolbar exists on top (has a closing button) and the url looks like aggregator.com/content/myposttitle.html The visitor can view my entire site content through this iframe and has the opportunity to visit relevant posts of other aggregated blogs. Here are my questions:
a. When a user visits mynieceblog.com/mypostname.html who gets to see visits/impressions on his google analytics?
b. Do I get incoming links from aggregator.com? Could this be possible only if the user closes down the toolbar?
c. Does this hurt the ranking of mynieceblog.com since I both see mynieceblog.com/mypostname.html and aggregator.com/content/myposttitle.html in search engine results for some keywords?
The view of my blog content through this aggregator does not hurt my site reputation. I have read that bandwidth use is an issue too! I am more concerned about my rankings and page views.
It can't harm you and probably gives you some credit. You found it yourself so it's getting traffic.
Your own Google Analytics code will be run so you will see the visitors. You can actually tell who is framing your website via the Hostname parameter in Google Analytics. Hostname seems to get set to the domain shown in the address bar.
Google does see the link but how much ranking you get from that is unknown. Somewhere between 0 and 100%! I have recently read a test where someone believed some framed content was indexed.
It cannot hurt your ranking. Worst case is that it ranks higher for a keyword so Google presents their page for you instead of yours directly.
If you're really worried about it then you could implement some JavaScript code to make your page break out of the frame. Something like this:
if (top.location != location) {
top.location.href = document.location.href;
}
If your viewer views your website through aggregator.com then surely i wont help you for SEO. For good SEO viewers needs to visit your site directly from aggregator.com
It's not a question of hurting your site reputation - it won't; however, will it benefit your site? I'm unsure, but if you get any benefit, I imagine it would be less than if your site was access directly.
As this article suggests, the SEs may be able to spider your content through the aggregator, but the aggregator won't gain from your content (framed content is rightly considered to be outside the site), and given the dynamic architecture of many aggregators, you may also not gain much/anything.
I would imagine that the you could consider exposure of your site through an aggregator could be considered an in-bound link, but it is unclear whether SEs would agree.
I'm creating a shareable widget, for anyone to copy onto their website. The shareable piece of code is an frame that points to the actual widget that lives on our hosted site (i.e. ourdomain.com). If we ever want to tweak the actual widget, we can do so in one place, with no effect on the iframes pointing to it from other sites we have no control over.
I tried the approach of cross domain tracking. While I was analyzing the results, I observed that the path of the shared widget code (not on our domain) appears within the content view in GA. This runs counter to a response from my previous post "if it is being inserted into many domains you are going to need to set up multiple GA accounts and use different account numbers per user."
Correct me if I am wrong: Any tracking code using our unique account id will appear in our GA by default, no matter where it's hosted, whether the code is implementing cross domain tracking or not.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=6af5b4c3e30c71be&hl=en
Since any page that hosts GA tracking code shows up in our content view, I could locate where the widget is being viewed by simply looking for all pages whose name did not include ourdomain.com. Of course this includes proxy servers as well, but I was going to also include a custom variable so I could implement a filter based on the custom variable.
So explain to me where this breaks down or what I'm missing here. Is there some amount of data I am losing here because the GA cookie is not in fact being utilized? Give me a good reason why I should put in the effort to fully implement cross domain tracking, including the necessary P3P implementation on our server for IE visitors.
As a sidenote, I am considering adding GA tracking code with an event tracker within the widget itself to track when people actually USE the widget (as distinct from the when the widget is loaded). I understand that by not implementing cross domain tracking I would not be able to obtain any data about the visitor, only whether the widget was acted upon or not.
As the referring site is the primary bit of information we need,
I'm going to pass the referrer in the URL that loads the iframe content
and then overide the referrer within the tracking code
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride',ht_referrer]);
as documented here:
http://www.prusak.com/google-analytics-referrer-override/
This way, I don't need to inject tracking code into my widget, just some JavaScript that adds the referrer to the URL that loads the iframe.
Wish me luck.
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My records show a particular page of my web site was visited 609 times between July 2 and November 15.
Google Analytics reports only 238 page views during that time.
I can't explain this discrepancy.
For Google Analytics to track a page view event, the client browser must have JavaScript enabled and be able to access Google's servers. I doubt 60% of my visitors have either disabled JavaScript or firewalled outbound traffic to Google's tracking servers.
Do you have any explanation?
More Info
My application simply puts a record into a database as it serves up a page.
It doesn't do anything to distinguish a bot viewer from a human.
The disparity is almost certainly from crawlers. It's not unheard-of for crawler traffic to be 10x user traffic.
That said, there's a really easy way to validate what's going on: add an ASPX page which emits a uncacheable, 1x1 pixel clear-GIF image (aka "web bug") to every page on your site, and include an IMG tag referencing that image on every page on your site (e.g. in a header or footer). Then parse your logs for hits to that image, looking at a query-string parameter on the image call (e.g. "referrer=") so you'll know the actual URL of the pageview.
Since crawlers and other bots don't pull images (well, Google Images will, but not images sized as 1x1 pixel in the IMG tag!), you'll get a much more accurate count of pageviews. Behind the scenes, most analytics software (including Google Analytics) uses a similar approach-- except they use javascript to build the image URL and make the image request dynamically. But if you use Fiddler to watch HTTP requests made on a site that uses Google Analytics, you'll see a 1px GIF returned from www.google-analytics.com.
The numbers won't line up exactly (for example, users who quickly cancel a navigation via the back button may have downloaded one image but not the other) but you should see roughly comparable results. If you don't, then chances are you don't have Google Analytics set up correctly on all your pages.
Here's a code sample illustrating the technique.
In your header (note the random number to prevent caching):
<img src="PageviewImage.aspx?rand=<%=new System.Random().NextDouble( )%>&referer=<%=Request.UrlReferrer==null ? "" : Server.HtmlEncode(Request.UrlReferrer.ToString()) %>"
width="0" height="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" alt="pageview check">
The image generator, PageviewImage.aspx :
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.ContentType="image/gif";
string filepath = Server.MapPath ("~/images/clear.gif");
Response.WriteFile(filepath);
}
BTW, if you need the image file itself, do a Save As from here.
This is of course not a substitute for a "real" analytics system like Googles, but if you just want to cross-check, the approach above should work OK.
Could the rest of the page views be from crawlers - either Googlebot or others?
Are you looking at unique page views in Analytics and total page views in your logs?
Probably crawlers. Our website was being hit every couple of hours by robots.
Are you positive the site is working properly in all browsers? I've seen analytics thrown off by pages that fail to render properly in Firefox but work fine in IE, and vice versa.
Maybe the tracker of your web pages record every hit, even if it comes from the same IP address (same surfer hits the page twice).
It is not, many visitors have javascript turned of or have the customize google firefox extension installed.
Given the time stamp of the last comment, I thought I'd leave an update here; Google Analytics recently announced they'd let people opt-out of Google Analytics, on the user-side, meaning if you didn't want website owners to track your movements, you could effectively become invisible on sites that are measured by Google Analytics. this could further offset your data points. in a sep thread, I suggested running two web analytics tools (many free to choose from) to measure against each other.
Justin's answer is very good. I would just add this as a comment but I'm lacking powerpoints :P
One thing to keep in mind, too, when comparing analytics systems, is that there's always some discrepancy to be expected:
The methodology of page tagging with JavaScript in order to collect visit data has now been well established over the past 8 years or so. Given a best practice deployment of Google Analytics, Nielsen SiteCensus or Yahoo Web Analytics, high level metrics remain comparable. That is, can be expected to lie between 10-20% of each other.[ link ]