Serious concerns about Google and EasySocial
By David Judah on Sunday, 20 April 2014
Posted in General Issues
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Hi there,

Let me start by saying that our site is completely based on EasySocial, meaning that other then the 'Help' section, all the content is generated by ES. As you know yourself, SEO is the lifeblood of a social network. We have finally launched our site 3 days ago and had a good response since. Users are posting, sharing content and joining groups. The flow is steady which is as expected. I was though very surprised by our Google Analytics. According to their findings we had 2 visitors on day 1, and non for day 2 (we are waiting for day 3). That is obviously not possible and leads me to think that Google does not recognize (for some reason) ES web pages. I am far from an expert on SEO but the data so far is a bit of a warning and leaves me with a bit of concern.
I think this is about how you integrated the google analytics code into your website and not really coming from EasySocial part.
If you integrated the GA code thru a plugin maybe that plugin for some reason does not work on EasySocial pages.

I think your best bet is to "hardcode" your GA code into your template's index.php file to avoid any issues.
Mist
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Sunday, 20 April 2014 05:55
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Hi Mist,

Thank you for your response. I will be honest with you I am not much of a techie. I am not sure how exactly to do the things you are talking about. I paid for a plugin which established the Google Analytics code with my site and thought that that all I needed to do. Do you know of a plugin I can get which will include the configurations you mentioned?



Thanks in advance!
David Judah
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Sunday, 20 April 2014 06:38
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You could try disabling the plugin and going with Mist's method. How you do it is to go to yoursite/administrator/index.php?option=com_templates&view=templates > Click Your Template > Click the index.php file on the left side area > Look for the head closing tag. > Place your GA code in there

It should look something like:

<script type="text/javascript">  var _gaq = _gaq || [];  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-352628-1']);  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);  

(function() {    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;    

ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www')   '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';

var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);  })();</script></head>


Be sure not to have two ending head tags.

Stackoverflow is my evidence of why to place it right before the closing area of the head tag.
Josh Lewis
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Sunday, 20 April 2014 08:25
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Thanks for sharing guys! I believe you also need to take into consideration that at times, the algorithm in Google analytics might not take into account of the possibilities that crawlers / robots are visiting your site.
Mark
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Sunday, 20 April 2014 14:53
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Dear Josh,

Thank you for that. I do not have a remote clue on how to do that but I guess I will have to get someone to do it for me.


Thanks again.
David Judah
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Sunday, 20 April 2014 23:23
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David, it's pretty straight forward. You know about HTML tags having opening and closing tags right? Using the instructions provided in my last post to get to the index.php file, you simply look for the closing head tag. It looks exactly like this: 
</head>
Place your Google Analytics code right before the closing head tag.
Josh Lewis
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Monday, 21 April 2014 03:11
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Thanks for sharing Josh
Mark
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Monday, 21 April 2014 09:53
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