Do you trust your Hit Counters?

In the early days, people loved to display a huge block of yellow-over-black hit counter on their website. Up until today, some still do that to show visitors how many hundreds of thousands of visits their site got. Others, just love to use them cute chicklets. For most bloggers, that chicklet has been replaced by the Google/Feedburner subscriber counter button.

For those who still use and display hit counters, did you read the fine print?

Loren Baker explains on Search Engine Journal how some hit counter services get their funding to operate these free tools — Google Loves Transparent Links & Hit Counter Spam.

Basically, these hit counters would use your displayed buttons to display links as well. These links are being sponsored by interested parties wanting to build massive backlinks to their sites, obviously in order to rank for certain keywords.

So, you might not just know about it but you are actually linking to some spammy sites. Go check the fine print of your free hit counter service. Better yet, check the output HTML of the hit counter’s code.

[tags]spam, hit counters, link building[/tags]

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

9 Comments

Ronald Allan says:

17 years ago

im new only on SEO and im developing my site …

please use google analytics….

that will greatly help you
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Tiffany says:

17 years ago

Again, we blame you!! Hahaha. Kidding.
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i, batangueÃ±o says:

17 years ago

i don’t trust hit counters eversince. just using it as decoration. :)
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levr says:

17 years ago

I am using Clustr map, i didn’t know if it is ok or not? can you suggest some trusted free hit counters?
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es-i-ow says:

17 years ago

If the original code is in javascript (no HTML links in original code), then any HTML output from that javascript code is useless to Major Search Engines
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ernesto says:

17 years ago

Yes I am using Google Analytics and it’s the best tracking or counter ever for me…
- Reply
JP Loh says:

17 years ago

Chat/Shout boxes do the same thing too. Sometimes they include spyware.
- Reply
Grace says:

17 years ago

Hello. Just visiting your site. I just saw your site in Youtube. Yung sa Mel and Joey. Nice job!! Totoo talga yung sinabi mo na kikita ka by just blogging! :)
- Reply
jamie says:

17 years ago

im glad my blog service provider has a widget for statistics. i dont have to look for a free hit counter anymore.
- Reply

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