Search Engine Referrals Confluence Plugin

Description/Features

This plugin displays the most recent searches on Google and other search engines that have lead to a click on your Confluence instance.

When someone enters search terms on Google and clicks on one of the search results, the search terms are sent to the found website in the "referer" part of the http request. This plugin collects this information and displays it to the user.

A click on the search result opens the page Google has found. A click on the search engine icon at the left displays the corresponding Google search result page.

The list of Google's search results is an extremely important piece of information. For example, by inspecting this list you can figure out exactly which information on your pages seem to be most attractive to your users. Does that page actually answers the user's question? If not, you might want to improve the article. It is also very interesting to find other websites that are listed in Google's search result for some search terms.

Ideally, one would process the server's access log files to obtain this information, but often one does not have access to these files, or Confluence is not configured to write access log files. However, the {referrals} macro is independent of server-side configuration so it will work under any circumstances although it only shows the last few search request entries.

The supported search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo at this time, these two seem to cover about 99% of all search requests on my website. But let me know which other search engines you would like to see.

Installation

Upload the plugin to Confluence just as any other Confluence plugin.

Usage

Place the {referrals} macro somewhere in your Confluence markup. It will then display the 15 most recent search engine results. To display a specific number of rows, use the max parameter. Note that the {referrals} macro internally stores at most 100 entries, so increasing the max parameter beyond 100 has no effect.

The referrals are not stored in the database. Therefore, after a Confluence restart of after an upgrade of the plugin the referrals list will be initially empty but will fill up over time.

Examples

Here is the code:

{referrals:max=10}

And it looks like this (actually these are the live search engine queries for http://www.schirmacher.de):

Version History

Open Issues

Screenshots

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