Site Stats No Longer Counting Clicks on bit.ly links. What's up?
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I host downloads for my blog readers on my Amazon S3 account and run the links through bit.ly so I can track the number of downloads for each file. I like to look at my blog stats page and see how many downloads I have per day. However, today I noticed on my blog stats page that bit.ly links no longer show up in the Clicks area. There used to be a bit.ly category and a sublist of each individual bit.ly link. Why the change? Will bit.ly clicks come back into my click counts? Thanks!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Probably because bit.ly has been reported as spam or your blog has been reported as an affiliate marketing blog, designed around driving those clicks, and thus staff have interfered with the way the links work. I expect both, actually. Also you are tag spamming, using far too many catetories and tags on each post, which will cause search engines to put you in the spam category as well.
It is against the Terms of Service to have a blog designed around affiliate marketing. You can use occasional affiliate text links as part of a blog here, but not in every post. Not if that’s what staff think that’s what the blog is really FOR.
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Those are not affiliate links in any way. They are links to my cloud storage account where I keep all of my files for download. The only affiliate link I have on my blog is for books for which I was the editor of and I got permission from you guys. AGAIN, the only links I run through bit.ly are to my personal cloud storage acccount with Amazon 3S so that I can track how many downloads I get. I actually pay myself to host those files and get NOTHING from Amazon or bit.ly. Everything I offer to my blog readers is FREE to them and I do not make ANYTHING except for the affiliate link to the books I edited and WordAd income.
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As far as tag spamming, I never heard of that. I always am ENCOURAGED to tag my posts when I make one by the pop-up on the screen that says, “you have posted xx number of times. You might want to effectively tag your posts.” So just exactly how many of tags/categories are allowed?
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Effectively tagging your posts is not the same as over-tagging them. You should never use more than a combo of 15 and generally speaking that’s suspect too. Ten is better than 15.
Apologies about the affiliate comments: I thought you were talking about Amazon affiliate links. I would expect, then, that nobody has clicked on the links today. Try clicking on a few, and then checking the stats in another two hours (stats are not in realtime). If they dont’ show up then, we’ll have to have another look.
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Actually, I just checked bit.ly and I have had 44 clicks today. I will cut down on my categories/tags to 10 (some of those categories I use are sub-categories, if that makes a difference).
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Can you give us the direct link to a post that has a particular bit.ly link in it, along with the stat for that link from Bit.ly? This needs closer examination.
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Sure! On this post: http://hangaribbononthemoon.com/2013/11/10/2014-mutual-theme-calendar/
bit.ly says I had 17 clicks today on this link: bit.ly/1hXm5YV. Thanks for you help :) -
Okay, I looked at the code for that and it looks just fine:
<a title="2014 Mutual Theme Calendar" href="http://bit.ly/1hXm5YV">here</a>The links work, as well. I’m a bit baffled.
Can you go to your Settings->Writing and make sure you have selected “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML” and save the update. That should take care of any HTML errors that might be floating around in it. If you DID have that selected already, then I’m pretty much out of ideas and will have to kick it upstairs: staff will be able to tell if other users have reported bitly links as spam and thus gotten them removed from the system.
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I did not have that selected. I just selected it and saved the update. I am still having the problem. It is strange, because the bit.ly click count problem just started showing up recently. I’ve had thousands of clicks to my bit.ly links over the past year and they’ve always showed up in the click count even though I did not have settings>writing>wordpress should correct invalidly nested XHTML selected until today.
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Hello there! Only recently our spam filter had begun filtering out clicks made on bit.ly links, and that may be why you can no longer track these links in your stats page. Might be beneficial to switch to a different redirect service such as goo.gl to track your downloads. Sorry that I’m not able to provide better news!
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Hi Druesome,
Can you tell me when this spam filter began? or Neishas, perhaps you can tell me since when did your Bit.ly clicks stopped registering? I am having the same problem but it appears that I haven’t had any registered clicks on WP since early April, does that sound right?
Thanks.
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Hey there,
In our efforts to fight off spam, yes, we have been working on our algorithms lately that may have affected outbound links going to Bit.ly. Many spammers use Bit.ly and similar services to trick users into clicking on links thinking they were still part of their blog, but instead are led to a spam site. That’s not to say your links are spam links, though as part of our investigation, everyone was affected. We are truly sorry about this!
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