YemKay

This question arose in my mind after I designed the embed code of my Google Analytics Widgets based on inline frames. The iframe based design was more comfortable because I could keep the widget’s dimension under my control without depending on the embed code. Rather, I can do anything within the frame’s source page like adding dynamic hyperlinks.

My big mistake here was that I wrongly guessed that search engines treat these hyperlinks as back links as the iframe is embedded on another site. But what I saw was that the search engines treated the links to my page from within iframe tags worser than the nofollow links. I didn’t find any back links in Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site explorer. Next, Ravi gave a feedback that iframe in the embed code made him wary.

Finally, I decided to break the embed code into plain HTML without any iframe in it. Now, to the crawler’s view the embedded widget code appears as if it is originating from the same site and the links in the embedded code have now become back links. This also gives an an option to the user to remove the back links, if he/she doesn’t want to add credits to the widget creator.

Compare the two embed codes yourself,

iframe based embed code :
<iframe src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/GAEmbedImage.aspx?wid=07d59e9b-f1aa-4511-a0a6-b66b4e7a08a6&vars=%26daterange%3d1%26from%3d%26to%3d%26subreport%3d3%26sparkline%3dPageviewsSparkline%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26width%3d200%26height%3d200&width=200&height=200'></iframe>

Plain search engine friendly embed code :
<a style='text-decoration : none;' href='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/' target='_blank'><img style='border: 0px none;' alt='Loading…' src='http://www.yemkay.com/apps/SiteAnalytics/HitCounter.aspx?wid=7b2bc7bf-17b1-41c3-968b-6b66499a6f7c&vars=%26subreport%3d3%26summary%3dPageviewsSummary%26since%3d20070101' title='Google Analytics Widgets' title='Hit counter powered by Google Analytics'></img></a>

But I’m yet to find out how search engines treat iframes? Do they index the frame sources as well? And if they do so, do they treat the links on the source pages as back links?

This is the third widget in the Widgets for Google Analytics series.

There are hell a lot of sites that offer hit counters for free. But I bet you this is the first one that is powered by Google Analytics (GA). Why would you let other sites to track your traffic when GA already does that extensively. So lets make a site counter out of GA…

Here it is,

This widget has a similar UI as the subscriber counter widget offered by FeedBurner. It pulls the number of visits/visitors/pageviews from your Google Analytics profile. This widget takes two parameters as input: statistics whose count has to be shown and a date from which the count has to be calculated. All you need is a GA account and a free registration in the Widgets for Google Analytics section. Create a widget, paste the embed code in your side bar and let your visitors know hit count of your site.

Create this hit counter free ».

I apologize to those who couldn’t visit this site in the first week of March. The site went inaccessible after a server issue and it has been fixed now. The inactive period has been nicely captured by my Site Analytics widget.

You can create this free widget in the Google Analytics Widgets section, if you use Google Analytics for your site/blog.

The image based widget in the Google Analytics Widgets series, which was launched last week, can now be created in custom colors as per the color theme of the embedding site. I’ve added options to set colors of background, title, axis labels and chart. Additionally the font size of title and axis labels are also customizable. Here are some of the widgets in different themes.

I’ve also added a gallery page that showcases the currently available widgets. Suddenly I see a huge traffic driven to the widget’s page, but none is converted. I believe this gallery page will give them a good insight of the widgets before they create one.

After launching the Google Analytics Widget project last month with a flash based widget, now, I’ve added a new light weight widget to it. The new widget is a PNG image and generated using the Google Charts API. It sizes just 10KB for a 200 X 200 widget as against 400KB for the flash based one. This widget supports analytics like visits, page views, bounce rate and time on site.

A sample widget that shows the page views statistics of this site:

I’ve embedded one mini widget in my sidebar which shows Page views analytics of this site. The bulky flash based widget has been moved to a new page.

Click here to create this free widget for your site.

Read my post for the product launch here.
Know more about this product here.