Posted by Alec on Thu, 14 Jan 2010, in SEO Web Design
I have been using StatCounter, as my website tracking statistic provider for many many years, even after Google Analytic came out. I liked Google Analytics but there is just one thing that Google can't provide that StatCounter does and that is the most useful piece of information I get from the stat. StatCounter provides a way for users to track down user's activity, which means you can track down individual visitor's activity, from entry page to exit page and the length he/she stays on a particular page. This is never provided in Google Analytics, but of course Google Analytics does provide things that StatCounter doesn't.
But anyway, the reason of writing this post is to actually point out the fact that if you look carefully on StatCounter's installation code, it actually contains some crap which is never needed. It was included for their advertising/ search engine optimisation purpose.
A standard statcounter code would look like:
<!-- Start of StatCounter Code --><script type="text/javascript"> sc_project=xxxxx; sc_invisible=1; sc_partition=xx; sc_security="xxxxxxx"; </script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js"> </script><noscript><div class="statcounter"><a title="web stats" class="statcounter" href="http://www.statcounter.com/free_web_stats.html"><img class="statcounter" src=http://c43.statcounter.com/3617605/0/f5e534d8a/1/ alt="web stats" /></a> </div></noscript><!-- End of StatCounter Code -->
As you can see, there is this hyperlink and an invisible image with alternative text of "web stats" linking to StatCounter website. Sometimes, the anchor text would be different like "MySpace counter", or whatever they want to advertise. I guess this explains why StatCounter has a pagerank of 10 few years ago, which is now 8.
You can actually exclude the link by removing the noscript tag. It will still work brilliantly.