I am working on a blog factory and we let the final user to use a fully customized domain name like www.myawsomeblog.com. There is a lot of people using this feature, so we cannot do a per case treatments.
How we can tag our pages in a way that we can track traffic for each domains without pain? Even if, the traffic statistics is a little mess is not a big deal as soon as there is a way to see which domain have which traffic.
Thanks !
Ideally you would want a profile for each site, but you would have to manually set each new one up. But it sounds like you want to avoid that...
The easiest but least flexible way to do it would be to pop your _trackPageview with the full URL so it shows the subdomain instead of just path, in pages reports. But that puts all of your sites into a single profile, and there's no easy automated way to segment them (you can, but it's manual, esp since you have arbitrary domains popping up).
Alternatively if you don't wanna mess with having to change existing code, you can setup a domain prefix filter for your profile, to rewrite the page name to have domain prefix.. but that still gives you same problem as above. You can filter your reports to see
the different domains, but they won't be in aggregated buckets. You will have to basically export to excel and do some manual grouping/filtering there, would be easiest.
Related
We have a website which provides services for people based in particular city.
We want to scale and provide it for more cities but we want to remain separated IT within the city realm: one webhost, cloud service , database etc for one location. It does not only enables us to scale individually (some cities are bigger than other several times) but most significantly it improves our code-base and db queries to not use city's predicates - despite the fact it is more expensive in general.
At the same time we do not want to use subdomain. User can switch city through dropdown and request should go to appropriate VM without url being changed so the routing should work seamlessly.
Based on Azure documentation we are still not sure what solution would meet our needs, Traffic Manager, Load balancer or custom redirects.
How you accomplish this is ultimately up to you, but from an Azure-specific perspective, the only multi-region built-in load-balancing service is Traffic Manager. This operates in one of three routing modes:
Primary/failover
Round-robin
Closest (based on latency, not physical distance)
For any other type of routing (such as letting the user choose location, per your question), you'd need to implement this on your own or via 3rd-party service (and how to accomplish that would be a matter of opinion/debate/discussion, which is off-topic for StackOverflow).
Since you're looking to have a separate DB, cloud-role and webhost per city, I do not see how you can get away from doing subdomains.
Do you not want subdomains because of SEO? If so, it'd be easier to find another way to solve SEO problem.
But whatever Traffic Manager or other DNS based routing solution you use, it'll be splitting users by where they come FROM and not where they're going TO.
The destination problem is solved thru separate sub-domains
I am sure many of you have found fake referral traffic in your google analytics reports/views. This makes it difficult for low to medium traffic sites to have accurate data for marketing. I am wondering what others are doing to exclude this traffic from their analytics reports.
If you go to your analytics account and go to acquisition -> all traffic -> referrals you will see sites like floating-share-buttons.com. These are the sites I want to filter out. Which you can do by setting up a custom filter for the view as described at the bottom of this page. I have done this and it works.
I would rather block these bots from hitting the site all together. Just a note: my sites are running as web apps in azure.
I am not sure if setting up url rewrite rules described here will work in azure apps or if this will mess with the existing url rewrite functions of the Content Management System I am using (DotNetNuke DNN platform 7).
I am really just looking to hear what others have done to block bots rather than than setting up filters in the analytics view's settings.
Thanks
PS
for those who are interested, this is the current filter list I am using:
webmonetizer\.net|trafficmonetizer\.org|success-seo\.com|event-tracking\.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now\.com|buttons-for-website\.com|4webmasters\.org|floating-share-buttons\.com|free-social-buttons\.com|e-buyeasy\.com
With regards to this issue, there are a number of things that you can do. You are going the route that I see most commonly used and that is to block the information using the filters in Google Analytics.
You can go the route of an IIS Filter as well, just like you have linked. DNN's Friendly URL's will not necessarily be impacted by this as they are processed BEFORE DNN gets the request. There is a marginal performance impact by having two things process re-writes, but nothing to be concerned about until incredibly high user volume.
This is also a great collection of options.
First you need to know that there are mainly 2 types of spam affecting GA right now, Ghost and Crawlers.
The first(ghosts) never interacts with your page, so any server-side solutions like the HTTP rules or htaccess file won't have any effect and will only fill your config files with.
The crawlers as the name imply do access your website and can be blocked this way, but there are only a few of them compared with the ghost. To give you an Idea there are around 8 active crawlers while there are more than 100 ghosts and each week increasing.
This is because the ghost method is easier to implement for the spammers.
From your expression, only success-seo is a crawler. The rest should be filtered. Now there is a better way to get rid of all ghosts with just one filter based in your valid hostnames instead of creating of updating one every week.
You can find more information about the ghost spam and the solution here
https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
https://moz.com/ugc/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter
Hope it helps.
I have a web application, there is one input can let user post their website links.
However I try to protect user as I can.
Is any free website can check the links for you?
What i'm looking for is passing the links to the security site, if the links is ok, it will auto pass to the destination, if not, it will stop and let user know the site is not safe.
links(my site) -> security check website -> destination
The Web of Trust API allows you to check the user-provided "reputation" of a website.
WOT is a good suggestion. However, keep in mind that the crowdsoured nature of this project can be an issue, security wise.
For example, using few fake account, one can boost the trust of a malicious domain. This is especially true for "under the radar" domains, that would generate no organic ratings.
Admittedly, this would probably be resolved over time (as users become exposed to the threat) but the process could be repeated again and again...
I would suggest to use WOT as cross reference, combining it with other factors (i.e. Alexa) just to filter out small domains, which are not likely to be rated - expect by their owners.
Best way is to manage your own list...
this issue just did not make sense to me, perhaps someone smart can help?
why is it that many hosts do not allow you to set htaccess or server-side includes?
specifically alot of the free hosting plans do not allow this, what are some situations that they are thinking of that makes them disable these features?
Income - You're not paying anything, the only money they get are from advertisements.
Resources - they take up additional resources. Offering only the essentials reduces the amount of risk and maintenance.
Agreement violations / unethical practices - It may reduce the amount of people signing up for free accounts to redirect websites, rename, hog resources, etc.
That's just what comes to mind.
I am new to this as well, but one thing you can do with SSI is to make your web page design a lot easier.
You can seperate headers, footers, and nav divisions (or any HTML elements that are on every page of your site) into their own HTML files. This means that when you add a page, or change one of those elements you only have to change them once, and then ensure they are included with an SSI include command into the correct spot on every page, nearly eliminating the chance of mistakes when putting the same element on every page.
SSI basically writes the referenced html file directly into the page wherever the include statement sits.
I know a lot less about .htaccess because I haven't played with it yet, but you can change which pages the server looks for SSI code in using different configuration commands. It also looks like you can enable SSI.
I know there is a lot more to all this than I wrote here, but hopefully this gives you an idea.
Here is a website that probably better explains this: http://www.perlscriptsjavascripts.com/tutorials/howto/ssi.html
I'm possibly developing a web-based application that allows users to create individual pages. I would like users to be able to use their own domains/sub-domains to access the pages.
So far I've considered:
A) Getting users to forward with masking to their pages. Probably the most in-efficient option, as having used this before myself I'm pretty sure it iFrames the page (not entirely sure though).
B) Having the users download certain files, which then make calls to the server for information for their specific account settings via a user key of some sort. The most efficient in my mind at the moment, however, this requires letting users see a fair degree of source code, something I'd rather not do if possible
C) Getting the users to add a C-NAME record to their DNS settings, which is semi in-efficient (most of these users will be used to uploading files via FTP hence why B is the most efficient option), but at the same time means no source code will be seen by them.
The downside is, I have no idea how to implement C or what would be needed.
I got the idea from: http://unbounce.com/features/custom-urls/.
I'm wondering what method of the three I should use to allow custom urls for users, I would prefer to do C, but I have no idea how to implement it (I'm kind of asking how), and whether or not the time spent learning how-to/getting that kind of functionality set-up would even be worth it.
Any answers/opinions/comments would be very much appreciated :)!
Option C is called wildcard DNS: I've linked to a writeup that gives an example of how to do it using Apache. Other web server setups should be able to do this as well: for what you want it is well worth it.