I am running a website with affiliate links .
When the visitors of mydomain.com/page.php click on such an affiliate link,
they are being sent to a link on a domain owned by the affilate network (network.com/link), and then redirected through the affiliate network, to the relevant page in the store (store.com/page.asp).
Over the last two months, the reports of the affiliate network indicate that about 13,000 clicks that I sent to such links, carried mydomain.com/page.php as the referring URL, as I would expect.
However, about 20 other clicks carried abnormal referring URLs, such as:
http://app.mam.vaccint.com/getapp/CT3297962/mam.html
http://www.store.com/page.asp
http://www.network.com/link
http://apnwidgets.ask.com/widget/everest/radio/4/radio-button.html
http://search.yahoo.com/search
http://www.google.com/webhp
http://www.bing.com/
http://192.168.1.1/spyware/blockpage
Unfortunately, This has led the compliance team of my affiliate network to believe that I have a hidden traffic source apart from my website, they claim that it appears to be as if I am using some kind of a third party software to send traffic to store.com, which is not true of course.
They are holding me accountable for this situation and I am required to provide explanations to this situation.
What could have caused my website visitors to arrive at network.com / store.com while carrying the above referring URLs?
Not sure though, but looking at the referring URL's its quite certain that these pages had your content listed on their webpages. Like:
e.g. google.com/webhp - listing the result content / cache / image result of your webpage
Bing.com - another result related webpage (generally web cache)
192.168.1.1/spyware/blockpage - looks like someone accessed your portal but ended up reaching this firewall custom page. But somehow the affiliate widget got loaded as it would have been permitted by the firewall.
Store.com/page.asp & network.com/link - looks like some internal redirected urls which sent traffic to the relevant page (store.com/page.asp)
(rest other) - all other links also can have a similar story which ended up sending traffic to your affiliate network, but had another URL.
I'm sure if you replicate this case in front of them via Google cache / Bing cache, they would get a better understanding of the issue.
Else, try to identify the source referrer of page: network.com/link, which probably is under their control and they would have access to the logs.
Related
A service provider is supposed to forward messages on to an endpoint (specified by me) but all I get to give them is a URL. How can I make this work.
I have signed up to a satellite service and I am trying make the first steps with their cloud API. I have hardware which sends simple messages over their satellite infrastructure to their cloud services. The provide the user (me) with a dashboard type interface to register the hardware as well as a desitnation (or multiple destinations) each destination is a single url. I dont get to specify usernames, passwords, code or anything just a single url. The service says
"the data will be forwarded to the pre-registered http(s) endpoint (the URL I have given them). Data is sent as a http POST request with Content-Type: application/json. All data is accompanied by an endpoint reference, timestamp, a unique identifier (UUID), and a digital signature that may be used to verify that the data originated from Myriota. Multiple packets may be batched into a single request."
I have a website so to start with I just want to get a single message to display on my page. I have completed and tested the code to display posts by GETing from https://www.mywebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts. This works.
the URL that I have given the service provider is the same as above. But none of the data reaches my site.
I dont really know how the data exchange or handshaking works here but I assume that for a third party to post to my site, they would need to include some sort of authentication. can this authentication data be included in the url? what is the authentication data? is it my Wordpress username and password? Is it safe send this data in a url? Can I turn off authentication so that anyone can post to my site? surely that isnt safe?
I have minimal experience with web development but plenty with embedded systems, I am working with a young software engineer and he is stumped also. together we have burned nearly a whole week on this so I have bit the bullet and turned to stackoverflow to see if anyone can help
our business advertises on the classifieds website www.kijiji.ca, and as part of that they have a link back to our website on all of our advertisements. In what looks to be an effort to prevent tab-nabbing, kijiji recently added rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" to their 'referral' links. This had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking analytics for me, and any other person who advertises on kijiji.
I've taken this up with Kijiji, but as I suspect it's a security concern on their part I doubt they'll be open to changing it. They are currently investigating the issue.
At the same time as the original change, they forced '/referral=kijiji' to the end of any URL passed into their website link field. So, my question is if anyone knows of a way to configure a filter in analytics which sees that url and causes the hit to be attributed as a referral.
Of course, as a work around you can just go into the Landing Pages report and search for '/refferal=kijiji', but that breaks reporting and causes your Mediums/Sources reporting to falsely attribute referrals as direct traffic.
If anyone has a workaround I'd be very grateful! Thanks for reading.
As far as I'm aware, there isn't a way to set a referrer after the data has been collected by GA as raw GA data is not modifiable. You could send a virtual pageview with a utm parameter for attribution purposes. Keep in mind that this will inflate your pageviews count and will also consider the session to be a non-bounce.
If it were me, I'd fire an event when I detected '/referral=kijiji' in the URL and then create a segment of sessions that included the event. Be sure to use a non-interaction event so that your bounce rate isn't affected.
At my company, they have a Wordpress site. Disclaimer: I'm a new hire here.
They also use a third party service/website called "act-on". Within act-on, we can manage our campaigns, generate webforms that submit data back to act-on and generate anchor tags that link to resources that act-on hosts.
I want to be clear, we upload documents to act-on. Then, act-on gives us links that we can place on our website to these documents. When a user clicks the link on our website, they are taken to a subdomain of our website that they did not create, to view the resource.
When I talk about "act-on", I'm referring to this service:
https://www.act-on.com/
Example:
We live at websitename.com.
The anchor tag that act-on creates, links to solutions.websitename.com/acton/resourcename
We didn't create a page or subdomain "solutions.websitename.com" and don't have any pages that reflect that.
I need to know how this works because their google analytics doesn't seem to track page visits to this subdomain.
How has act-on created some subdomain on our website? I don't understand that process. How can act-on link to files that they host, but the url be a subdomain of our website.
Thanks,
It is very similar to another company called reachlocal. They basically proxy all your web content, and in a lot of cases they even put up proxy phone numbers and record the calls audibly and transcript them. All this in addition to marketing campaigns such as analytics, PPC and alike.
A business essentially gives them this right when signing up and are told about it upfront.
It is all for the sake of keeping record in order on file of everything taking place, with web presence and "presented in a friendly interface and graphs. Which also allows employees to listen to recorded calls to "see how the employee does"
More than likely from my experience is they were given the keys for all web presence, including web, analytics, social sites and so on by the owner or project manager.
Unfortunately, by proxying all the websites they in turn get a lot of Google ranking, but it can be a valuable service for some.
Bottom Line: Someone at your job, signed up, gave them the go ahead to perform tasks such as proxy domain names and are in fact paying them.
This is somewhat of a newbie question I'm sure and I hope the community will excuse me for not knowing this (or not knowing the appropriate search terms to resolve my question).
So, this is the deal: I'm running a small webpage with a small amount of visitors. I've written the whole page in HTML and CSS myself and I host it in my private DropBox (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3394117/Hemsida/Psykofil/Index.html).
I've bought the domain name "www.psykofil.org" from Loopia (www.loopia.se) and I've directed this domain to the index.html file referenced to above.
Now, this is what I want to happen: I have three different places you can go to on the page (you choose where to ge through a menu on the left). When one of these links is clicked, it takes the user to another .html-file. What I would like to happen here is that this is seen in the adress field so when he or she clicks on "x", it should say www.psykofil.org/x on top. Also, when he or she navigates away from the webpage through a hyperlink I would like the adress field to update to show the new location. Right now, no matter what the user does, it always says www.psykofil.org in the adress field.
I probably should mention that my options (freely translated from swedish) when I go to the configuration of my domain name at Loopia is the following:
DNS
Parking
Forwarding (the one I'm currently using)
Send to an external URL
(Unavailable because I don't have a web hotel with Loopia) Point to another domain in the account.
(Unavailable because I don't have a web hotel with Loopia) Own homefolder for webpage.
That's because your page is inside a <frameset>, so the address bar will never update.
You say "I've directed this domain to the index.html file referenced to above." It sounds like you've set up 'domain forwarding.' Framesets are often the 'trick' hosts use to keep the same URL - embedding the pages you're 'forwarding' to in a frameset. It's called "domain masking." See http://www.hostingmultipledomainnames.com/domainforwarding.htm for a description of how it works.
If you upload your actual html files to your site root, that should do the trick. If you're not sure how to do that and you're a new webmaster, you may want to be in touch with your web host's support. Otherwise, if you want to have that domain, but keep your files in your dropbox account, your options I believe get complicated (things like reverse proxies).
UPDATED:
Typically, when people create a website, they do three thing: register a domain, buy a web hosting account, and then associate their domain with their hosting account. You've done the first part, and have found a clever way of managing the second part, but you haven't done the third part.
The process is like this:
You register your domain. I.e., you pay $10-30 a year for the exclusive right to a given domain name. Registering the domain means that when people type 'http://mysite.com' into their browser, your domain will come up. However, it's just a placeholder - there isn't any real content there. All your files and images need to be uploaded to a server in order for people to see them.
You purchase a web hosting account. Or in your case, you upload your files to a publicly-accessible server, which has the advantage of being free. You then upload all your content.
This is the part you're missing. You now need to associate your domain name with your hosting account. This typically happens without your intervention when you purchase both your domain name and your web hosting account through one company.
However, if you acquire them separately, you need to do two things:
a. Log in to your domain registrar and point the domain name to your server for your web hosting account. This is a signal to the Internet - hey, when you type in the domain name 'http://ssss.com', go to this server.
b. Log in to your web hosting account and "park" the domain at your account. This may be hard to understand at first, but basically, just telling the Internet to go to this or that server when typing in your domain name isn't very useful.
If that's all we needed to do, I could just register http://my-amazon.com and point my domain to Amazon.com. Then people could surf Amazon.com as http://myamazon.com and I could get rich from selling this now incredibly popular domain.
But that doesn't work. In order for me to actually browse the web hosting account through my domain name, I need to "add" the domain name to my hosting account. Dropbox doesn't let you do that. It's a file-sharing system, which you've cleverly used as a web host. However, you'll never be able to log into Dropbox and park your domain there, because that's not what they do.
Summary: You can think of this process like a pass in basketball. You can throw the ball by sending the user to a server, but the server has to catch it. In order to catch the ball, the server needs to know it's coming.
Your domain registrar is 'faking' this process by adding one page to its own server, which links to "http://dl.dropbox.com/yourpage/etc/etc/Index.html". This way, your domain registrar doesn't have to worry about hosting all your content and the headaches of technical support and server space.
The downside is, you don't have a webhost that allows you to park a domain at the moment. The upside is you're saving about $60-100 per year (it might be more or less in Sweden), which is what a basic "shared" hosting account would cost.
You can decide if having distinct webpages (http://psykofil.org/contact.html" etc), is worth it for you, or whether you're fine for now with the very low-cost solution that isn't perfect but at least allows people to access your site. What you've come up with is actually pretty cool, but it does have some limitations.
Finally: If you do want to go ahead an buy server space so you can host your site, it will be less of a headache to buy it through Loopla, if the price and service are good. Typically, you are given the option when making the purchase of linking your account to your already-registered domain name. Then all you need to do is use an FTP program like Filezilla to upload your content to your account, and you're done.
It seems your host is "masking" the URL, meaning actual index.html page located at "www.psykofil.org" is in fact, loading your index page located via dropbox into an "iframe" , hence your main URL does not change to reflect the changes.
Solution: Upload your file to your main host and change the default index file that has iframes with the dropbox index file.
I believe it's because you're using frames. Were you to simply link to the other html page(i.e About page) then the address bar would update.
I'm building a site that will allow sellers to:
list their products on my site
have each product link back to the seller's site
be charged for each link clicked
What I need to do now is to somehow make sure that I am only logging actual human users following the links to the sellers site. If it's a bot crawling the site, I shouldn't be charging the sellers for that.
Is there a way for me tell bots not to follow a certain link? I don't think it's nofollow as that is not intended to block access to content.
The way to tell a bot not to follow a link is precisely to add rel=nofollow to your <a> tag.
Assuming you are also logging locally before forwarding to the external url you could also check the user agent string.
In fact, if you are going to ask people to pay based on number of referrals it might be an idea to log IP address and user agent against each paid for click in case your stats are ever questioned.
You just add a [robots.txt] file, e.g. like this one.
You can find more info about [robots.txt] files on the net, e.g. in Wikipedia.
Typicall you can identify them by the user agent string. You can find a list here, can't say it's perferct, but it's a good base to extend: PHP/MySQL - an array filter for bots
Robots.txt is another way, more about it here