This last week I was going through my analytics. Just the other day, I put together a post on how an user could use Google Analytics to track the like button. And I’m pretty happy about that. But what I found in my analytics is inexcusable. Just under 5% of SpiderMarket’s traffic (nearly 100 people everyday) are being diverted from the page they are trying to get to, to a page that shows up as blank. And it seems like I’m not the only one having this problem.
Just google the appendage. You will see that Google has so far indexed over 50,000 pages with the “?fb_xd_fragment=” at the end. These pages resolve to a blank, codeless page.
The most interesting thing of it is, if you look at the URLs affected, it’s not just little guys like you and me. It’s big sites that you’ve heard of.
The common thread here is that none of these sites use the rel canonical tag. It seems like that has done well to keep the fragmented sections out of the index for most sites. But for people like me, the loss in traffic is significant.
What’s more is, it appears that facebook developers have been made aware of the problem, but they aren’t working quickly to fix it. So, for the time being, until this little problem is fixed, I’ve removed facebook’s like button from my sites.
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