I was hoping that incoming link count for a post in discourse database means no. of times external websites have mentioned that post in their content.. But the numbers that I have are too high to believe that. Could someone please explain what does incoming link count mean?

I believe it is the number of incoming links from the forum itself, that is, the number of other posts that have linked to that post. There is no rational way to determine how many times external websites have linked to a place without crawling the entire web, like Google.

I looked at the code and it seems like incoming_link_count is similar to the “topic_views” table except it doesn’t increment the incoming_link_count when the request format is json. Here’s the relevant lines in topics_controller.rb def track_visit_to_topic topic_id = @topic_view.topic.id ip = request.remote_ip user_id = (current_user.id if current_user) track_visit = should_track_visit_to_topic? if !request.format.json? hash = { referer: request.referer || flash[:referer], host: request.host, current_user: current_user, topic_id: @topic_view.topic.id, post_number: @topic_view.current_post_number, username: request['u'], ip_address: request.remote_ip } # defer this way so we do not capture the whole controller # in the closure TopicsController.defer_add_incoming_link(hash) end TopicsController.defer_track_visit(topic_id, ip, user_id, track_visit) end I was hoping this column would tell me the number of times someone arrived at this topic from an external link (including external search engines) vs clicking internal links.

[image] Greg Atkinson: I was hoping this column would tell me the number of times someone arrived at this topic from an external link (including external search engines) vs clicking internal links. Same! It would be great if it’s possible to see which topics are being visited the most from external links :+1::+1::+1:

What does `incoming link count` in discourse database mean?

Community Building Data & reporting

gassim (Al-Gassim Sharaf Addin) January 11, 2023, 4:37pm 4

Same! It would be great if it’s possible to see which topics are being visited the most from external links

Topic		Replies	Views
Most clicked external links? Development	2	684	September 6, 2019
Aggregated click number on forum click counter Feature	6	2824	March 27, 2015
Finding list of shared links Feature	2	669	May 2, 2019
Dashboard Report - Top Traffic Sources Data & reporting sql-query , dashboard-reports , dashboard-sql	2	574	December 14, 2023
What does 'top referred topics' measure? Data & reporting	10	1584	April 9, 2024

What does `incoming link count` in discourse database mean?

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