weblog

In December 2007 I installed Google Analytics on my weblog and portfolio. Before Analytics, I was using host-provided tools to analyze my web traffic. For the money (read: free) Google Analytics is everything I didn’t know I wanted in traffic-tracking software. There are a couple interesting things that I realized after installing GA on my sites:

Some of my links were not going anywhere

I use WordPress to publish my blog and portfolio. I created some content that was getting a fair number of visitors per day and, late last year, I updated the post and changed the permalink URL for the article. As a result, I was getting a number of 404s results from visitors accessing the outdated URL. The publishing solution was to install Redirection, a Wordpress plugin developed by John Godley, that handles 301s (permanently moved resource), and 404s (not found). I recommend it for anyone who needs a visual way to edit your .htaccess file.

My site got Flickr-ed

A referral link from Flickr helped me uncover this screengrab of my weblog.

It’s easy to tell what content is popular

Until the beginning of this year, my most popular post was pulling in 50-150 page views per day. Then I posted a jQuery cheat sheet. According to Google Analytics, my article hit del.icio.us on February 10th 2008; you can see what a popular post can do to your web traffic.

Popular articles change your page rank in Google search results

Until posting the above article, my very popular name positioned me as a fourth-page “loser” among every “Scott Olson” indexed by the search giant. Now I’m the first hit for “G Scott Olson” and I’ve snuck onto the first page of results for “Scott Olson”.

Other sites can (and will) use your Google Analytics account number

Take a look in Visitors > Network Properties > Hostnames. My first result is www.gscottolson.com (as expected), and there are a number of Google entries (for Google’s cached views of this page). One entry (www.artisopensource.net), was unexpected. After some careful investigation, I learned that the offending site scrapes content from the web and attempts to load it into the existing page. My blog got scraped and my Google Analytics JavaScript (and corresponding account number) ended up on someone else’s site. No harm since artisopensource.net has amassed a total of 4 page views (only slightly tainting my results). I’m hoping this comment sheds some light on any users baffled by this external site pulling in page views for his or her account.