Counting clicks in directories

Hi,

I see a lot of directories that offer to sort listings by popularity or by number of clicks. How can they know the number of clicks? I looked at the page source and the links are straight static links, no Javascript -- so how can they find out when a visitor clicks on a listing?

Am I missing anything obvious?

 

Yes. Like, what script(s) are you talking about?

phpLD uses javascript to increment.

 

The links probably have a javascript onclick event to report click through rates.

 

You can't count clicks with a "straight-through" link. Maybe they're using J/S, but I'd still examine the code for funny business.

 

You can count the clicks with a straight through link. Thats how google counts clicks on the serps.

 

OK, so without either a redirecting link or onclick handler, you can't count clicks.

http://www.deeplylinked.com/computers/hardware/ claims to count clicks (though perhaps it counts clicks on details page).

The hardware page on CuteWebDirectory (just an example) and many others can sort by "Hits" or "Popularity". I see a straight-through link with no onclick handler. So what are they talking about?

mad4, care to elaborate?

 

phpld does have an onclick handler and so does deeplylinked.
look for the AJAX in the code

 

Yeah, good luck with counting clicks on a "straight-through link".

The directory you're talking about shows 0 clicks for most links placed there three weeks ago. Not even the spiders care

 

Each link has an id for example id="523". There is then a script that uses getElementsByTagName and counts the number of time each element is clicked.

<script>var root = '';
	var a = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
	for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)if(a[i].id != '')
		a[i].onclick = count_link;
	function count_link(){
		i = new Image();
		i.src= root+'/cl.php?id='+this.id;
		return true;
	}
	</script>

Code (markup):

 

Ah, so the onclick handler is added dynamically after loading the document... I should have thought of that... Thanks!

 

I wouldn't say its added dynamically. Its just that each link is given a name and the script tracks each link that way rather than using an onclick for each link.

 

I guess it's a matter of definitions, but

a.onclick = count_link;

was what I meant by added dynamically.