LinkCounts Glossary
- Entry
- An entry is a single item (also referred to as a "story") that has been published in a feed. An entry may or may not contain OutLinks.
- LinkCounts
- Our linkcounts statistics reflect the number of links that we have observed in the entries published.
We break these down by In-Link and Out-Link. There are several things that affect the numbers that
we report:
- Depending on the feed, we may or may not see all links. Some feeds do not include the entire article.
- We do perform some filtering to remove references to things like XML namespaces and tracking gifs.
- We recently made some modifications that allow us to track individual LiveJournal sites instead of having all of the LiveJournal sites rolled into one number.
- Site
- We use the term "site" to represent an individual blog or web site. Often times we will use the presence of a feed as an indicator that something should be treated as a distinct site. We treat treat subdomains as distinct sites, so
http://site1.example.com is distinct from http://www.example.com. Sites may have multiple Sources
- Source
- A data feed from a site. Typically these are either Atom feeds, RSS feeds, or pings. It is possible and quite common for a site to have multiple sources.
- Active Site
- A Site for which we have been able to successfully process at least one Entry. An Active Site has one or more Active Sources.
- Active Source
- A Source from which we have been able to successfully process at least one Entry.
- Link
- We use this term to represent a URL. A URL could point to almost anything-- a feed, an image, an anchor, a namespace, et cetera.
- InLinks
- An InLink is defined to be a link that points to the measured site. Sometimes also referred to as an InBound Link. A site can have InLinks regardless of whether it has a feed of its own.
- OutLinks
- An OutLink is defined to be a link that originates from the measured site. Sometimes also referred to as an OutBound Link. A site cannot have OutLinks if it doesn't have a feed or its feed is not read by PubSub.
- Total Links
- The number of links that we saw after filtering the raw data (see definition for LinkCounts, above)
- Filtering
- We currently have a small number of filters active when we compute statistics. These filters remove things like namespace references, tracking gifs and logos.