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Dynamic Link Ranker

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| 14:23 UK time, Tuesday, 15 March 2005

Re-order links in left & right-hand nav bars according to popularity so that the most popular links appear at the top. The least popular links can be turned into promos to push visitors to them. It's like a 'live' extension to the 'go' tracking.

Each link is passed through to a mod_perl script that notes the referring and destination URLs.

* A table is created for each referring URL.
* Entries in that table correspond to links on the referring page.
* Every time a link is clicked, that destination's entry is incremented in the referer's table and a timestamp updated for that destination.

You can now rank the links on a page to show them in order of popularity.

This allows you to create dynamic navigation that updates as users traverse the site. Popular content is easily accesible, and the lowest ranking links could be automatically turned into promos.

This idea can also be turned on its head to allow user-testing of site designs.

Rather than changing the links according to popularity, you leave them as they are, but as the users progress throught the site, they leave an aggregated trail of what they clicked on.

As a site admin you can the toggle the display of the link tracking to see where users went from any particular page.

It would easily lend itself to better visualisation of navigation and usability if you turned the data into a spider-diagram.

Did have a demo of this working about 3 months ago, but will have to dig it out as its now in my archive. Watch the comments for updates.

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