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http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/30-php-best-practices-for-beginners/
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Here is a simple php script that will detect if your visitor is coming from Google and then log the keyword used to reach your site to a file. The script logs the visitors ip address along with the keyword and exact date and time to a file in the form x.x.x.x googled for “key word here” on Month Date, Year, at Hours:minutes am/pm. To use the script, just paste the following code into your php pages , and set the variable $log_file appropriately.
Here is the code :
/* JUST A FEW SETTINGS FIRST
The log file name,
this is where the key words will be stored,
make sure to keep a difficult-to-guess name
for privacy reasons
*/
$log_file="google-keywords-log.log";
/*
Set your timezone (just to make sure you can analyze the data better)
Some useful time zone values :
Asia/Karachi
Asia/Dacca
Asia/Qatar
Asia/Muscat
Asia/Tokyo
for a complete list, refer to http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php
*/
date_default_timezone_set("Asia/Calcutta");
// THE CODE
if (strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],‘http://google’) OR strpos($_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’],‘http://www.google’)) {
$referer=$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’];
$url=parse_url($referer);
parse_str($url["query"],$query);
$data=$_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]." googled for \"".$query["q"]."\" on ".date("F j, Y,")." at ".date("g:i a")."\r\n\r\n";
$fp=fopen($log_file,"a+");
fwrite($fp,$data);
fclose($fp);
}
?>
We first check to see if our visitor has been refered to our site by google by checking the predefined variable $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] for occurences of the string http://www.google or http://google using the strpos() function. Then we parse the referer url using parse_url() function. Then we go on to parse the “query” component of the array returned by parse_url() using the parse_str() function which parses the strings as if it were the query string passed via a URL and sets variables in the current scope. Once the string is parsed into the array $query , we can access our keyword term at $query["q"] .Finally we open our log file (set in $log_file ) in the append mode (a+) and append the visitors IP adress, the keyword and date and time to the file.
Ever wanted to know when Googlebot (google’s search engine spider) visits your site? . Googlebot can be sniffed (detected) easily using php. It is identifiable by the “Googlebot” string in the HTTP_USER_AGENT field it sends with the headers. Here is a simple function called is_google() which returns TRUE if the visitor is Googlebot, else FALSE.
To use the function, just call it using an if statement, here is how :
Some common uses of this function can be :
Many times during development involving php, one would want to store some variables as settings. The most common way developers do this is by defining those variables at the beginning of the script. For example, while writing a contact form script, I would like to define a few handy variables first, including admin email, contact log file name/path and etc… The most common way to do this would be to write something similar in your php script.
