Just a passing thought and question..

[The Dreamer]

Been [poking around the boards this morning (trying really hard to not smoke the last ciggy cause its too early to go and get a carton still :( ) and a question wandered across my feeble little mind (lol).

When you buy a domain name through a redirect service type thing... doesn't that mess up any sort of tracking for your site?

Example: Company XYZ has the domain name XYZ.com registered through say Name Secure. They have set up to have the name point to their site hosted at PQS Hosting. They also have a stat counter such as HitBox, which shows where visitors are coming in from. Problem though... if a person follows a link from a page that uses say a text link to XYZ.com (which is actually hosted at PQS Hosting and has a different actual address) then all that shows is that the visitor came in through XYZ.com. Not where they originally and actually came from.

Am I making sense here? What I'm wondering is this... how do you track something like that and how important is it actually?

If I've confused you, sorry... the lack of nicotine is getting to me here I think, so I'll shut up and just go lick an ashtray or somethin LOLOL... :D

[SteveS235]

I use HitBox for my site, and I can track both the domain they came from and the exact URL of the page that they came from. It is a very helpful feature they have built into the free version.

If I check the domain stats for referrals, it shows www.aol.com

If I check the URL stats for referrals, it shows: http://aolsearch.aol.com/cat.adp?from=showmore&query=musicians&layer=&id=340387

This is quite helpful for me, especially if it is a link from a search engine, because I can see exactly what someone was searching for when they came across my site. Plus I can see where I rank in the engine itself.

I can click on the URL link above, and see that my site is #2 in the AOL engine for the Musician Resources category.

This way, I can be nosy and see exactly what pages are linking to me, and what kind of link they have. Plus, if it is a site that deals in the same type of content, I can see who the "competition" is on the pages that link to me.

Plus, I am finding that there alot of sites that are linking to me that I didn't even know about. Which is good because search engines use the number of pages that link to and from your sites as part of the criteria that they use for position placement.

[jehraen]

SteveS235 is right. :)

If you have a good site tracker script, it shouldn't be a problem. Hitbox does give extensive stats. I use them on 1 site. You might also want to check out Ezstats4all.com. Invisible tracker(great if you don't like to display an ugly button/banner), fast, good support, free, rather extensive stats too. I use that on another site. :)