Tracking links to off-site destinations

[bonnyman]

I currently look at my web logs to see which pages are getting visits and what search engines are referring people to me.

I'd also like to know whether any of my visitors to my links pages all following the links to off-site pages, and if so, which links on this page are they following.

How do I do this (easily)

Thanks

[4serendipity]

Hi bonnyman,

Randal Schwartz has put together a nice Perl script to do just what you want.

You can find it at:
www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/col25.html

You can find similar scripts at script repositories such as HotScripts.

[edited by: JamesR at 11:14 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2003]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[JamesR]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld bonnyman! Thanks for posting.

Any click tracking script will work. Your outgoing links will look something this:

www.domain.com/cgi-bin/click.cgi?othersite.com

Most scripts will give you some method to log in to a page where you can see the number of clicks through that particular link.

Not too sure if SE spiders will follow the link though...

[Helena]

>>Not too sure if SE spiders will follow the link though...

What happens if SE spiders dont follow the links?

[fathom]

What happens if SE spiders dont follow the links?

They don't get credited with the backlink (& PageRank) and you don't get credited with linking out toother sites.

However, most bots, spiders, and crawlers will not have a problem with this at all (Googlebot for sure won't).