In the past few weeks I've done an extended analysis of visits on my blog, which made me wonder how the super fancy new web gadgets and features influence Google Analytics and traffic reports. By these new gadgets I mean the nowadays very popular URL shorteners, such as tinyurl or bit.ly, and the annoying inside-browser toolbars, used by Digg, Stumbleupon, Google images and other services. These inventions made me wonder, as well as probably many other bloggers, web developers and marketers do - are these things messing up the traffic statistics? To be sure, I had to try it out by myself and found out the following: No, they do not. Or better put, Google is smart enough to know what's happening.
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written 19:51 CET on chronolog