Question

I have a small website with several PDFs free for download. I use StatCounter to observe the number of page loads. It also shows me the number of my PDF downloads, but it considers only those downloads where a user clicks on the link from my website. But what’s with the “external” access to the PDFs (e.g., directly from Google search)? How I can count those? Is there any possibility to use a tool such as StatCounter?

Thanks.

Answer 1

.htaccess (redirect *.pdf requests to download.php):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule \.pdf$ /download.php

download.php:

<?php
$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if (!preg_match('/([a-z0-9_-]+)\.pdf$/', $url, $r) || !file_exists($r[1] . '.pdf')) {
    header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found');
    echo "File not found.";
    exit(0);
}

$filename = $r[1] . '.pdf';
// [do you statistics here] 
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
readfile($filename);
?>