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Backlink Alert Specs

Shannon J Hager [PersonRank 1]

Saturday, September 4, 2004
19 years ago

Is there a list of specs/features for the backlink alerts? For the last 12 hours or so of using it, I'm assuming that you filter out Google hits and have some sort of time limit wherein repeated links (or is it repeated visitors?) won't trigger repeated emails for the same link.

Is there any info on this somewhere?

Shannon J Hager [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

Also, how are the "total hits this month" calculated? Total hits for the entire site from all referrers (including non-alerted referrals)?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Yes Shannon, you're right. At the moment I'm filtering out referrer URLs which contain any of the following:

www.google.
/google.
www.yahoo.
/yahoo.
www.msn.
/msn.
bloglines.com
.technorati.
.daypop.
.feedster.
.altavista.
.oddpost.
?query
aolsearch
websearch
mysearch
a9.com
/metasearch
?search
.ask.com
/ask.com
/search
.blogger.

I filter search engines because for many of us that would be just too many emails. (Maybe I could do something with this data though somehow...)

As for the hits of the month: these are counting every hit, referrer or not. So you may get more hits than referrer emails. I plan to empty this data at the 1st of each month, so that it would reset to zero.

If you want to count different sites, by the way, you can use different emails. Say, for Gmail you could do the following different buttons for different domains:

susan-site1[put at-character here]gmail.com
susan-site2[put at-character here]gmail.com
susan-homepage[put at-character here]gmail.com
susan-blog[put at-character here]gmail.com

All of these would count as different accounts (which would also need to be confirmed separately).

Which reminds me of... I wanted to include the email-address of the account in each alert so they can be more easily separated (and filtered).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

PS: I'm thankful for any pointers as to which other search engines tend to clutter alerts... above are mostly from what I got for my alerts.

Shannon J Hager [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

I get about 85% of my traffic from search engines, 10% via RSS subscriptoins and the rest via links. That's why I assumed you were stripping the search engines from the alerts, otherwise, it would have been overwhelming for my inbox.
The only search engine I get traffic from besides the ones you mention is IceRocket. The only search terms that I get from IceRocket is "Mark Cuban", so I think he's doing ego surfing.

Most of my non-search engine traffic is from developers and/or other geeks so I won't have a normal day of usage of the backlink alerts until Tuesday (Monday is a holiday in the US).

So far, I like it. Gmail automatically groups all alerts from the same domain together (because the subject line only mentions the domain, not the page), so that helps keep the clutter down.

Thanks. Keep up the good work.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Shannon, I noticed too Gmail groups them the ideal way. I also set up a FindForward label, and filter all mails there and instantly archive them. However if I'm not mistaken when you instantly archive mails, they won't show in the Gmail Notifier...

As for IceRocket.com, I added this domain and it should now be filtered to not alert you.

Shannon J Hager [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

the gmail account I use for this is about 5 days old and I haven't given the address out anywhere other than in the tag for the fastforward backlinks button, but I just started getting spam at that address. I assume it may be due to spam spiders crawling my site and grabbing that address. If this isn't happening to you or others, I may be getting the spam due to the fact that I'm using a name as my address. If it is coming from screen scraper or spiders and this is a widespread problem, maybe you could use something like ?username=john.doe&domain=gmail.com instead of the email address, but still allow the old method (in order to keep from breaking it for users that haven't/won't change it).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Shannon, you are using your email with the "[put at-character here]" symbol – please switch to using "--at--" instead, which FindForward understands well, but spam-spiders won't (at least not easily).

This is described here:
http://www.findforward.com/backlinks-info/

And yes I do use the old method. Some (like me) use their full email address. I do get a lot of spam but it's filtered well in my Gmail, so it's no problem at all (it was a big problem in Hotmail, but largely because it flooded my inbox).

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

19 years ago #

Shannon, if you want I can give you another Gmail invitation so you can start with a fresh address. Just let me know.

Shannon J Hager [PersonRank 1]

19 years ago #

Thanks for the "--at--" info, I missed that before. My new gmail account has got 9 invites invites the first 4 days it existed, so I won't need to take you up on that offer. Besides, Google is doing a great job of sending the spam to the spam box. I get almost no spam in my hotmail inbox these days, either, they seem to be constantly improving their filtering, too. (and my 'block' list has been maxed out for over a year)

I think you should probably set up a FindForward Backlink Alerts FAQ.

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