16 replies to this topic

[Bioshox]

Id like to create a script that shows how many times a link has been clicked on my site

Is there a way to do this via PHP/MySQL?

Any tutorials/examples??

[Smilex]

make a javascript or php function that is executed by the onclick attribute that you put in your <a> tag.
PHP is good for if you want to store this count in a database
Javascript is if you want to work on the client computer
JavaScript and HTML DOM Reference <- that is w3schools's section on Javascript

[Orjan]

Yes, an javascript is one option. the other option is to use what for example facebook uses, a middlepage that takes the url as a parameter and then makes a header("Location") to let the user be directed to the correct url, while the middlepage itself does the statistics.

[Bioshox]

Any example code I could use for this?

I'm not THAT experienced with PHP as I am still learning.

So what you're saying is, the Link would be pushed to the middle page, where it would then carry out a function to count that statistics, and then direct them to the actual page?

[Orjan]

Yes, more or less. Usually, you prefixes the actual link with your middelpage so you write:

<a href="l.php?url=http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft</a>

in your HTML. this calls l.php (facebook calls this l.php, so I used them as example. you can call it whatever you like of course) with the actual url as a parameter.
in your code then, you do something like this:

<?php

$link = $_GET['url'];

header("Location: $link");

// here you do your database stuff so you count the link click 

// for example, you can store referring url, so you know what page they clicked the link on and whatever you like.

?>

[Bioshox]

I see, and then in order to count the visits I could use a simple MySQL insert and +1 to whatever number was in the field in the SQL table to begin with?

I need the links to be friendly to Spiders/Crawlers, would using this kind of URL still be able to create all important Backlinks to sites or would it make the link unfriendly to spiders and search engines etc?

[Orjan]

the link would not be so friendly I guess, but that's not within my knowledge area. an OnClick event on the link throwing an ajax request to a php script would probably be better for Spiders...

[Bioshox]

Thinking about it I doubt there would be any easy way to make it spider friendly.

Unless it would be possible to remove the l.php? via a htaccess MOD_REWRITE function?

[Orjan]

you could of course make a subdir /link/http://... instead but you still have a call to your server first which can make trouble in seo

[Bioshox]

Yeah, I think there's proably going to be an issue with this completly, I'm sure there would be a workaround.

Thank's for your input!

[Smilex]

Plain Text code - 11 lines - codepad
I really don't see why you would link like explained in this thread, other than doing the example I posted above

[Bioshox]

That was looks interesting, is it Javascript or PHP, is the OnClick event a.

Does OnClick within the Hyperlink require any Javascript/PHP Tag Openers/Wrapping or would that just work 'Out-the-Box'