I miss showing most frequent referrers.
Way back in ‘02, I ran referrer logs on my knitting blog. I loved displaying my most frequent referrers: then the referrer spam came. I tried valiantly to block referrer spam off, but it was too much work.
Recently, it occurred to me that I have much of the referrer spam issue under control; so I looked for a publicly available, cost free referrer script. I found www.e-referrer.com and installed it two days ago.
On the first day, the referrer list was blank. It’s now “charged up”; you can see the if you scroll down and view the left hand sidebar. I don’t think I’m seeing any referrer spam. I’ve checked and the sites and blogs on the list do include links to my blog. So far, so good!
Here are some features that make e-referrer attractive:
- E-Referrer evidently keeps a list of spam referrer addresses and pre-filters the list.
- I can select how many referrers to show and how many characters display for each referrer. This lets me tailor the display to fit my blog theme.
- I can edit and block specific referrer addresses. Should I ever get Google traffic, I will block search engines from the list. My goal is to display bloggers and sites that give me linky-love and also send traffic.
- I can display by “most recent” or “most traffic”. I’ve selected most traffic.
The service has other features — like letting me show how many referrals came from each site etc.
Are there any negatives? The links are created by javascript. So, I suspect Google won’t count these links. If Google doesn’t count these, I will eventually want to find a PHP based frequent referrer script. In the meantime, frequent referrers get a link my visitors might click.
For now, displaying referrers lets me reward my most frequent referrers a little; I rather like that. The script will remain there until I find something better!
A couple of questions for you.
(a) Do you have access to apchie logs? (atleast in theory) beause there are some great open source php stats packages.
(b) It shouldn’t be too hard to write something. I’ll do it in exchange for a review of mad-den.net
Yes, I have access to my logs (I think.)
No it wouldn’t be hard to write something! Hold of writing though so we can figure out what we want to display etc. I can review mad-den.net on Monday.
(I tend to be busy “socializing” on Sunday. I’ll show photos of what that entails on Monday.)
If you have logs access take a peek at awstats. Otherwise if you want something custom we can simply log lots of server data in a table from php and aggregate it into information.
My old host had awstats. Unless it’s changed, I don’t see how to easily show the top referrers on the blog or how to edit to not show google etc. (I know how to see who they are myself, but that’s a different issue.)
I had in mind writing a php script so I would have control of what’s displayed. I’m also thinking of checking out whether or not a plugin exists. I think if lots of dofollowers want to reward most frequent commenters with a link, even more w ill want