Devious web statistics
July 18, 2007
Using CSS selectors on visited links you could easily set a dynamically-generated image (1px transparent) to track whether or not the visitor to your page has visited a link before arriving at your site.
a:visited {
background-image: url(img/visited_img.php?id=$user_id&url=$url)
}
(You would either need specific selectors for each anchor tag, or, better yet, a piece of javascript that finds all the anchors on the page and dynamically generates the background-image property on each.)
It would possible to determine how often the visitors to your site have been other sites that you're linking to from your page. If you combined this with accurate click-through data, you could determine which pages people access by visiting your page, and which ones they stumbled across through some other means.
In other words, you could gather a "link freshness" statistic— that is, whether the pages you're linking to from the current page contain fresh/new (and relevant) links for the visitor, or whether the visitor is already aware of those links.
I wonder if anyone is already doing this.
I just checked the source on a Google search results page. They've got some nifty scripts in there, but I don’t see anything like what I'm describing. Maybe I'll have to build a proof-of-concept script and see if it works on this site.
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