LL Owners - Is This Ok?
 

I want to track how many clicks each of my freesites generates from the different LLs I submit to. The only way I can do this is to assign each freesite an ID and each LL an ID and have that in the URL I submit. In the interest of friendly URLs it would look something like this:
www.mydomain.com/sitename/112/15/

where 112 is the freesite ID and 15 is the LL ID. I've read everyone's rules and don't see anything stating this would be a problem but I want to make sure before I submit a URL like this. Comments please?

I know I have stats but those only tell me hits in total from your site. If I have several freesites in the same niche I have no idea which one(s) are doing the best so I can build more on the same concept.

Are you planing on building a different page for each link list?

No Cleo, there's only one index page. I just use the IDs to record an incoming hit for that freesite from that LL.

I'm not in the habit of linking to "The page cannot be found

The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. " sorry :(

Wouldn't it be better to have some keywords in your URL and maybe pickup some SE traffic?

That's not a real link Surfn, it was an hypothetical URL. I wanted to know if LL owners had issue with a link like
domain.com/sitename/112/15/ as opposed to a link like
domain.com/sitename/

/sitename/ is keywords Cleo, like /big-teen-tits/ or /hot-sexy-midgets/

I don't understand, if you are going to give a tracking number to each LL then how are you going to have multiple LLs on the page?

Could you give us a live example? What script are you using to direct these links to the site?

I'm foreseeing bots everywhere snagging those links as 302s.:(

The /sitename/ is the index page. It's a html file without an extension. It simply has a few lines of PHP at the top that explodes the /112/15/ part of the path info and updates a database table for hits to that freesite from that LL. Give me a few and I'll have a live example for you to look at.

So there is no redirect or anything like that for a bot to snag. I do, incidently, have as many known bad bots as I can find in my .htaccess - they get 404s.

It's not the only way.

If you really want to track incoming hits from LL, put a php script on top of the index.html page that parses domain name from the referrer info and record the url/domain name combo in mysql.

But from having done it, I can say you will probably stop looking at the stats after a while.

Referrer is not dependable:
'HTTP_REFERER'

The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.

Here's a live example:

http://dark.pr0npalace.com/darksites...n-goth/112/15/

Note: There are no recips on the page yet. I wanted to check this out before I bothered the LLs with submission.

Sub domains are not ok. :(

Also I got this error on that page.
" Too many HTTP redirects http://dark.pr0npalace.com/error/404.php"

I can't have all my niche freesites and tgps and hub on a subdomain of my domain?

I don't understand the error. I get the site with no errors when I click on the link.

I don't list sub domains :(

That's strange. I work for an adult company by day. We have a domain assesandtits.com. I have 2 subdomains on it... tits.assesandtits.com and asses.assesandtits.com. The freesites I build and submit from those subdomains have been accepted at most of the larger LLs (penisbot, link-o-rama, hoes, etc.).

If you're looking to count every single incoming click, you might not like using http_referer but for most clicktracking it's more than enough.

I guess you're mod_rewriting /114/10/ into something.php?linklist=114&freesite=10 and something screwy is going on with your .htaccess.

Just a guess.

Thanks Halfdeck, definitely an option. It seems my niche subdomain is more of an issue, though as I said in my previous post the large LLs I submit to for work don't have a problem.

No actually, I don't mod/rewrite because that is like a redirect which is definitely on some LLs no-no list. I think I know the issue though. Working on it.

There will also be reviewers who will reject it for the appearance of jumping from directory to directory. There are enough trip wires here that will probably make this more of a hinderance than a help.

Thanks for the input Useless Warrior. Well, so much for trying to make building freesites easier :(.

I have Wusage stats on my server and it lets me see traffic and referrals to individual pages by date and much more. All this without doing any funky coding or trying to reinvent the wheel.

Have to check into that. Thanks Cleo. My stats show referrals and page hits but not referrals to pages.