It happens frequently that programs such as Google Analytics or Lloogg produce statistics in defect respect to the ones produced by your server.

Photo Credit: AnaBGD

Fake visitors

The reason is very simple: the programs of web analytics that monitor the accesses reading the log files of the web server (as awstats for instance) erroneously evaluate like visits many contacts that are not.

Here a list of false positive that can wreck the web stats:

XML engines

When you submit your feed into XML aggregators, a bot check your feed for updates frequently. Feedburner, for exaple, works this way: more your site is up to date, more it comes frequently producing a lot of access logs which could be confused with real visitors, but it are not.

Spiders

It’s the same for search engines spiders that index your web pages. Some times it are so intrusive that can bring your server to crash.

Trackback spammers

This is one of the most common causes of false positive.

If your blog support trackback it is subject to be spammed. In fact spam bots continuously call the trackback script trying to insert some links.

Some of these bot are able even to modify its referring IP every time they call the script, and could therefore be seen as various visitors.

Comments spam

It is the same for the comments; bot continuously try to insert fake comments with links inside calling the script and generating a new log each time. Each log line can be confused with a visitor.

How to get perfect web statistics

In few words, it is not possible to get an affordable idea about web traffic using just a log analytics application.

It would be better to use an outside application, which makes use of JavaScript to track the visits on the content pages (I recommend LLOOGG, i have some invitations), and make comparison with the stats produced by your web server.

In this way attempts of spam on trackback or comments script will be ignored, and the visit counter will increase just when JavaScript will be executed on the content pages.

In any case you will never have perfect stats, but you will be able to have a more reliable idea about the real traffic of your blog.

However, focusing only on keywords might not only not give the expected results, but even damage promotion to the extent of precluding the site occurrence among search results.

Most important is instead to consider a specific parameter calculated by Google through different evaluation factors: site ranking.

What is site ranking?

It can be described as the importance of a site. Generally, one thinks site ranking is calculated on the basis of how many times it is linked by external pages. This is only partly true.

Links quantity has only a slight influence, since the importance of a site is determined not exclusively by absolute parameters but also by values interpreted over a period of time.

First factor: the age of domain name

Many domain names are created and kept active only for a short period, namely the time needed to carry out massive span actions using a domain which is closed once the operation is completed.

This is the reason why the domain age is an extremely important ranking factor: the longer a domain stays active, the greater the chance the ranking increases.

Second factor: site updating.

It’s not only important to update contents, but the way the updating is performed.

Content changes are not considered by Google as a renewal index. Indeed, modifications are monitored with accuracy over a limited period of time in order to determine updating frequency and quantity.

The reason is straightforward: massive cotent modification made over long periods could simply denote a graphic renewal of the site, while small but frequent changes to text are a probable index of constant maintenance and information updating.

In case this is noticed on your site, after a period of silent “evaluation” the ranking raises.

Third factor: external links.

It’s usual practice to exchange links in the hope of getting a ranking increase; however, also in this case, Google watches, records and evaluates with great attention and for a specific period, the development of the situation.

As a result, the sudden appearance of dozens or hundreds of links to your site in quite a short time doesn’t help; on the contrary, you might run the risk to be rated as a “web spammer”.

Avoid as much as possible reciprocal links, being them possible signals of a specific agreement.

Google considers positively external links, but on condition that reciprocal ones are a relatively small number or they increase at a reasonable pace over time as a result of a natural growth of users interest towards your contents, and above all that linked sites’ subject is somewhat related to your contents.

Fourth, essential factor: grammar accuracy and writing plainness

Google records, monitors and evaluates. But how can software be able to assess main topics in a site, or judge whether search keywords are related to its subject or not?

Search engines use particular programs which “understand”, on the basis of text contents, the main subject of a site.

Normal for a human being, it’s not quite so for an informatics system made of cold and stiff algorithms: anyway, programs of this kind are nearly always able to precisely detect a subject out of a text through grammar and logical analysis. Once this is done, previously described actions are triggered.

Obviously enough, if we don’t structure our contents in a clear and exact way, Google will not waste time “trying” to detect the subject, to the contrary, it will ignore us and, as a consequence, not even check for updates, link or other factors.

For example, a dynamic address such as

page.php?cat=news&cod=5

is much more difficult to index than a static one such as

page.html

More than a strict rule, it is a moment of confusion spiders tend to experience when in a page address a character like ‘&’, ‘?’ or ‘=’ is found.

Therefore, pages with a normal address are indexed more and more often than dynamic ones. In order to get round this inconvenience, there is a technique called url rewriting, that is getting the server to rewrite dynamic addresses as static.

The way this technique is put into practice varies depending on systems technology; its accomplishment is not easy, it requires time, care and a broad experience and, when handling extensive portals, may call for a well defined project planning.

In the examples we will deal with Apache/php technology. In order to carry out the task, we need use apache module “mod_rewrite” which allows the replacement of user inputted page addresses with new ones, calculated with a Regular Expression (Regex) based syntax. Let’s pass over Regex syntax, actually rather tricky and thorny (should you want to study it in detail please refer to http://www.evolt.org/article/rating/20/22700/.) Keeping our examples as simple as possible, suppose we need making

http://www.ikaro.net/articoli/articolo.php?file_name=url_rewriting
into

http://www.ikaro.net/articoli/cnt/url_rewriting.html

Following mod_rewriting configuration should be used

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule /articoli/cnt/([^/]+).html /articoli/articolo.php?file_name=$1 [L]

First row activates rewriting module, the second one replaces the dynamic address on the right with a static address using “filename” parameter value to name the page (which actually does not exist).

The two lines can be inserted:

• In a .htacces file in the relevant directory (the one in which the function needs being activated)
• In the httpd.conf configuration file (in this case super-user privileges are needed)

Please note that the static address page does not exist, it is simply an alias recognized by the server so that engines see a “normal” page instead of a dynamic one and index it as usual.

I realize that many users have some trouble in order to get simple reports such as search engine keyword list, or most viewed web pages with Google Analytics. Some example;

• Referring web sites
• Referring pages
• Search engine hits
• Most popular keywords

and so on. This is a micro-guide to Analytics for essential usage with some little hints and tips.

How to get a referring web sites list

Check the left menu and select:

Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source

You’ll see a list of  referring sites on the right side of the screen grouped by domain of the current week   (ou can change it,l et’s see it later ) . Take care, search engines will be shown here among others referring sites.

Specific referring URLs

Click on the red bullet close to the domain name in order to show more informations about the source domain, like the specific URL and others useful informations.

Search Engine Hits

Many users are not able to find their most popular keywords inside Analytics. Here it is;

Marketing Optimization > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion

That’s it. We get a list of  the search engine hits grouped by domain. You can also draw a trend chart related to each engine; just click on the red bullet to open a submenu an click on: Data Over Time. Take a look on others items; there a lot of interesting reports.

Popular Keywords

Now let’s see the keywords of a single engine: click on the [+] engine bullet and that’s it!. Also in this case you can draw  a trend chart for each keyword clickin on the red bullet close to it, in the same way you did for search engines domains.

Hints and tricks

You can change the time range of each list/chart shown on screen in this way;

1. Click on the yellow icon on the top right of the calendar table
2. Select the start date on the left
3. Select the end date on the right
4. Click on “Apply range>>” below

Another useful feature of Analytics is the daily trend which can be really useful to discover the best hour to publish new content on your website. It’s enough to click on a single day into the calendar panel in order to display the traffic trend on hourly basis.

So, it’s not exactly the Analytics Bible, but it’s enough to start. Now it’s up to you.
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