People on Hootsuite love the extensive stats that ow.ly provides.
But most people reading ow.ly links on the web don’t realize that there is a simple way to get rid of the ow.ly iframe so that they can navigate to the linked website normally and pull the actual permalink for the article so that they can bookmark it etc.
Here it is:
“The ow.ly social bar can be closed via the x in the upper-right. You can also choose to hide the ow.ly social bar completely for all links you visit with your current computer/browser.
To do this, click the down-arrow next to the x close box, and then check the box that says ‘never show me ..’
I do think that Hootsuite should explain more about each of these points – especially #4 to their users.
Great article this morning by Brian Solis. I needed to remove the iframe to get the link to post to Delicious. Thank you to SimonMainwaring for spotting it.
Hi Linda–Great point, we should be doing more to communicate how #4 in our list works.Essentially, if the ow.ly social bar detects that the visitor is a search engine bot/crawler/spider, then we pass them straight through to the target page with a 301 redirect. This means your Google juice/SEO should remain intact. Also note that we’re working out pricing plans and additional features for "pro" level paid accounts. Being able to turn off the ow.ly bar for your tweets is one of the features we’ve been talking about for paid accounts.Thanks for the feedback.Jeff @ HootSuite
My concern isn’t from the user perspective, but the website host perspective. I can’t seem to find any information on whether google analytics is counting pageviews from hootsuite. I need to aggregate all of my data in one place in order to provide information to my site advertisers, and a significant amount of traffic is fed through social media posts created in hootsuite. I find it very frustrating.