Visitor Tracker in Blogs

Do you know how dangerous it is to use third party visitor tracker in your blog? It affects number of organic search driving traffic to your blog (visitor coming to your site by searching in the search engines) . It will definitely reduce your blog’s page rank and increase the page rank of the free script provider you are using.

I have a bitter experience with using third party free tracker script.

Last year I wanted to track my visitors. I searched in the net and found a tracker site, which offers free tracking service. All you have to do is register in their site, you will be provided a javascript to integrated in blog (In all the pages). Later you can login to the site and check/view your visitors.

I do not like to tell their name.

I integrated the javascript code which tracks my visitor.

After two days, I was excited to see the visitors movements in my blog. An average 30-40 unique visitors per day. All have landed to my blog by search engine results. I checked the referrer url of every visitors. This was going well. There are many repeated visitors.

After a couple of week, I noticed that users driven to my site by organic search results get reduced. They are now from 20 – 30, or some time 15.

I doubted that, there might be fluctuation in the traffic spike. It is common.

After a month or two, this figure does not improve. Average users driven by organic search result was 20. Before integrating the Third party tracker code it was 40.

The tracker code inserted in all the pages of my blog by integrating in to the template. So in every page there is an out going link or out bound link.

Any webmaster can understand the importance of having more inbound links and less outbound links.

What is the impact of more outbound links? Outbound links which are irrelevant to your site. Search the net and know it.

So without my awareness, I created hundreds of out bound links from my blog by integrating tracker code, which points to a domain out of my domain.

After tracing out this issue, I removed the visitor tracker code from my site.

After a month, the visitors driven by search engines got increased. It comes to previous figure. I hope it will increase.

Well, I need to track my visitors, and how they are navigating, what are the pages they are visiting, etc.

So, I decided to have a visitor tracker software deployed in my server/domain.

The software should not increase the load of my server.

I decided my own visitor tracker script, with simplified or limited features.

I developed it in PHP/MySQL. It is simple one.

I installed it my server. I integrated its tracker code.
Now the tracker code points to a subfolder in my server. No links pointing out of my domain. A visitor tracker without creating outbound links

So my search engine driven traffic will not get affected by visitor tracker script, since it is operated withing my domain.