Is BoingBoing tracking outbound links

27Jan/070

Is BoingBoing tracking outbound links

BoingBoing, a great meta site that you should visit right now, appears to be running their outbound links through a CGI program. I noticed it on a few entries, so it might be a test for an ad tracking system of some sort.

Here is an example page that shows the outgoing link starting with:

http://boingboing.net/cgi-bin/clicker.cgi?

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It seems to be hit and miss as to why they put the tracker on outbound links. One can guess it's for tracking outbound link popularity, but then it would be on each outgoing link.

I do know they use Federated Media to sell ads. Federated previously handled a majority of Fark's ad sales, which sort of leads me to think this is advertising based. Fark has used a similar outbound link program for forever that looks like this:

http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl

I hope the outbound link program is just a test. One of the great things about BoingBoing is the traffic they can drive to your site. When they post something of yours you not only get the traffic, but you get the residual traffic and links from other blogs talking about the same thing. If they moved entirely to the outbound link program, your site would get less of the residual linkage from other blogs.