A couple of my posts have gotten pretty popular and been shared around the internet quite a bit. But I didn't realize how widely they had been shared until I got a surge of views and reactions on an article one day, decided to google for its title and URL, and found a bunch of places that people had shared it.
To be clear, I'm very happy that people enjoy my writing enough to want to share it around! I don't want it to sound like I'm trying to track and prevent the sharing of my content, or anything like that. But I've found a couple cases where stuff I've written has sparked conversation, and I don't want to miss out on that!
(Also, let's be honest, the narcissist in me just wants to find out how much the world loves me. 😎)
Anyhow, I'm wondering whether anyone has found a good way to keep track of when articles you write are shared around without explicitly @ing you on Twitter or something. I'm aware of Google alerts, but (1) I've found them a bit unreliable, and (2) it would be kind of a pain to add a couple Google alerts for every article you issue.
Is there an existing solution for this out there? Any ideas?
Top comments (17)
Maybe then "magic pixle" or image style approach might work? E.g use an image in your article, but one hosted on a domain your control and can get analytics on?
Wouldn't be perfect, as it depends on the content being shared with your embedded image intact, and not just copy and pasting the text.
Beyond that, maybe if the search method is working, you could do some automation of the process.
E.g part 1, scrape your posts, part 2 do the searches, part 3 alert you on some way if s new result is found?
Yeah the former is a no-go because typically it's just the link and title that are shared, not necessarily a card or anything. The latter is something I've thought about, and could be fun to write as a side project and share around... 🤔
Scraping:
docs.python-guide.org/scenarios/sc...
Excuse the bias towards Python :)
Haha, thanks for all the suggestions! Tbh I'd be slightly more inclined to go a Node.JS route, since it's where my knowledge lies (and would give me practice that could be directly applied to my day job), but I do enjoy the occasional Python hackathon, so who knows!
Email alerts:
pythonforbeginners.com/code-snippe...
Google search with Python:
pypi.org/project/google-search-res...
Start something open source on GitHub, I am sure others would help.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if each of the tree things already exists, although maybe in isolation.
Google search but so far it doesn't seem to get a lot of results.
Twitter search also gave me a couple of results (search for post url or title wrapped in
").The post views on DEV are being tracked by Google Analytics and shown in your Dashboard, I am no expert in the Google Analytics API but I think it should be possible to also fetch page referrals.
Yeah, both Google and Twitter have given me pretty solid results when I search for the dev.to URL or the article title (especially articles with pretty unique names). But it's a lot of manual labor to search multiple terms in multiple places, and I'm just so lazy...
Not sure if it was because of this post but it seems that @ben got inspired:
What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)
Description
This feature adds custom tracking of page views from within the app to complement and compare against Google Analytics data. This should make initial reporting faster and more reliable.
This also opens up the opportunity to show users their history.
Unrelated to this thread, but yes, we are working on a few things to improve analytics and insights for authors. We should be able to provide data about where posts are being shared and where folks are coming from in the future.
The minimal SEO know-how that I know says that you could use some analytics engine to track the traffic and referrals to your website, and use social to facilitate those conversations while analytics tells you where they're taking place.
Just check your Hirsch index :)
On a serious note, I can't even imagine good ways of finding this out except for just googling random chunks of original text or checking it with some kind of anti-plagiarism systems used by universities
Great question!
brand24.com/ but its a paid solution.
thanks for question! and yes, py you know is really ❤️ and :easy: