Recently, I’ve began the laborious process of migrating away from Google Analytics on most of my sites.   Why?  Because it is frankly starting to scare the hell out of me.

Here’s why:

• Bounce rate is believed to be a factor used in determining your Google search rankings.  This is a measure of the percentage of visitors the leave your site after only viewing the initial first page.  It would be silly and very unfair for Google to penalize sites that don’t use Analytics, however, for sites that do use Analytics, Google can easily access your bounce rate.  Without Analytics, I can’t think of an easy way Google engineers could figure this out, unless they’re using data from the Chrome browser, in which case we’re all fucked.  I know some people will say “well, just create quality websites with unique content that engage your visitors, and your bounce rate will go down”.  I’ve said the same thing myself.  It’s good advice.  But I still don’t want Google having such easy access to data that they’ll use in determining my rankings.
• Lately, Google has been on a real witch hunt for private blog networks and other SEO services.  There’s been reports by many companies about their domains being deindexed by Google, which essentially destroys their business.  Being in the SEO biz, I don’t want to share any data with Google if they’re coming after people like me.
• I’m worried about the whole footprint issue, with all my sites using Analytics, I’m assuming that somehow this makes it easy for Google to calculate similarities in traffic between my sites and negatively impact my rankings.  I also think Bing/Yahoo can notice this footprint.  Maybe this is over-the-top paranoid, but it worries me nonetheless.

Here’s a few of the alternative web analytics tools/services that I’ve been evaluating:

StatCounter

• They host your data and you just have to add a bit of javascript code to your site.  So, no FTPing or creating databases to get StatCounter to work.
• Their Free account seems decent, suitable for sites that you don’t care about Goals or Actions or anything super comprehensive

Clicky

• Another popular hosted service.
• They specialize in real-time data and have a tool that allows you to popup a chat window with visitors
• Their Free account doesn’t seem very good, so there’s a fair bit of pressure to upgrade to a Paid account.

Piwik

•  Probably the most popular open-source, self-hosted solution.  This means you need to download the software, unzip it, FTP it to your server, create a MySQL database, then go through the installation process.  It’s a PITA initially but…
• The functionality is much better than StatCounter, at least from what I’ve seen
• I’ve been running Piwik on a few sites for over a year, the only problem being some larger reports have trouble loading due to PHP memory issues.  This could be resolved by moving away from shared hosting to something with more horsepower like a VPS or dedicated server.

Open Web Analytics

• Another self-hosted app, so you’re running it on your own server.
• Clean and comprehensive interface.
• It looks like Piwik is the more popular self-hosted tool, but OWA has an impressive list of features.
• Comparison to Google Analytics:  http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158

What about you?  Have you left Google Analytics for similar reasons?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As an owner of SocialAdr, a social media marketing web service, I get the opportunity to hear what people think about different SEO techniques on a daily basis.  Occasionally I learn a thing or two.  But most of the time it’s just plain wrong.

Social media involves many people from around the world “talking” about a webpage from many different social sites.   The search engines know that the more “social” activity they can pick up about a specific URL, the more effect this should have on that URL’s rankings.  And in the past couple years nearly every major Google algorithm change has further embraced social media.

I realize that I’m fortunate I decided to create a social media service in 2009, rather than an article marketing service, or a directory submission service, or any other type of SEO service that is becoming less and less effective.

Here’s a few myths that I hear quite often:

There’s no benefit in having multiple backlinks from the same domain

This is one of my favorite.  People get brainwashed on forums like the Warrior Forum, that backlinks are only beneficial if they’re doFollow and from different class-C IP addresses.  Maybe that used to be true, I don’t know.  What I do know is that the core concept behind “social media”, is having multiple accounts on the same site promoting your URLs.  When something goes “viral”, does it receive a single Tweet and a single Google +1 click and a single Facebook Like?  Hell no.  It receives thousands of similar social signals, from all over the place.

Furthermore, certain social media sites, such as social bookmarking sites, use “votes” to help promote URLs to the “top votes” pages or even the homepages.  And these pages are often high traffic and high PR.

So by getting multiple social media backlinks from the same domains, your URL is not only saying to search engines “Hey, look how popular I am!  It’s almost as if I’m viral!”, but it is also appearing on high traffic / high PR pages.  How is that not absolutely ideal for SEO purposes?

NoFollow links are useless

This myth isn’t specific to social media, but to SEO as a whole.  Recent research has shown that a healthy mix of doFollow / noFollow links is better for search engine rankings than having only doFollow links.

Wait a sec…what?  So even though Google (Matt Cutts) proposed the idea of the nofollow hyperlink attribute, an idea that has been widely adopted all over the web, they don’t even abide by it themselves?

That’s just ludicrous!

Or is it?

Here’s my take on it.  Originally the nofollow attribute was intended to help reduce spam.  Webmasters could use the attribute so that would-be spammers would be less inclined to leave spammy comments, because the backlinks they received from those comments would have no SEO value.  But…as more and more sites starting using nofollow attributes, the percentage of “legit” available backlinks become lower and lower.  That means the % of links Google can use in their ranking algorithm is/was shrinking.  It’s only natural to believe that if your input variables become fewer, the quality and accuracy of your algorithm reduces.

If you think about a “natural” progression of backlinks to a specific webpage, what would this consist of?  By “natural” I mean you’re not promoting your own webpage and nobody else is doing any SEO work for you.  The internet world has discovered your webpage and, because it’s so awesome, people feel obliged, without incentive, to promote it.  In this case, you might get a bunch of Tweets, Likes, social bookmarks, microblog mentions, social networking status mentions, Web 2.0 posts, blog posts, press releases, articles, etc. etc.  Now what type of links would these be?  Would they be ALL doFollow?  Hell now.  They’d be a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow.

So in Google’s eyes, sites that have a healthy mix of doFollow/noFollow backlinks haven’t tried to “game” their rankings.  It’s likely they obtained their publicity honestly and naturally, compared to sites with ONLY doFollow links that are obviously using grey hat SEO techniques.

I want to create my own social media accounts and only promote my own URLs

Although I don’t hear people making this exact statement, I get the feeling from reading forums and seeing the different social media software offerings, that this mindset is very popular.

I look at it exactly the opposite.

Let me use an example.  A recent piece of desktop software I saw on the Warrior Forum made me reflect on this philosophy.  Here’s what it does:

1. Creates a Hotmail email address
2. Creates social media accounts (you have to manually enter CAPTCHA unless you have one of the popular paid services setup)
3. Posts a bookmark to the accounts it just setup

I’m not even going to talk about the fact that it’s risky to repeat these steps a large number of times from the same IP, as the software doesn’t utilize proxies.

What I want to talk about is how this process is the opposite of what you should be trying to accomplish with social media.  Rather than setting up accounts, for yourself, that will only ever contain your own URLs, what you should be striving for is having other people promote your URLs to their accounts.  Then, and only then, will your social media campaigns appear “natural”.

Now if you’re wondering how you can get other people to promote your links, here’s a couple different ways:

• Design an attractive website and write quality content that engages visitors and encourages them to spread the word out of sheer love for what you’ve created.  (this is difficult for a lot of people to accomplish, but is ideal if you can make it happen)
• Pay people to spread the word about your pages (SocialAdr is one service that does this very effectively)

Hopefully this post helps clear up a bit of the misinformation that’s out there related to SEO, link building, and social media in particular.

Google’s latest major algorithm change, rolled out in Feb 2011, is called “Panda” and was big news for anyone doing internet market or SEO.  Many marketers reported huge SERP drops while a lesser number noticed gains.

Rumor has it that the Panda update came about from a focus group that Google held.  They had real humans evaluating actual websites and giving their opinions on different metrics.  The results of this group were then translated into a programming algorithm that was encorporated into the ranking calculation engine.

I’ve done a bunch of research and experiments on my own rankings since this update, as well as reading what guys a lot smarter than myself have published, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Domain quality is now important again

In the “May Day” update prior to Panda, a chance was made that allowed individual pages to rank higher on their own merit, regardless of the trust value or strength of their domain.  It looks like with Panda that’s been reversed and now the collective value of ALL pages for a domain is taken into considering.  This is the main reason why EzineArticles rankings dropped and they’ve lost a lot of traffic.

What does this mean to me?

• It’s no longer beneficial to add hundreds or thousands of low-quality content pages, as they’ve drag down the rankings of your entire domain
• It’s better to build backlinks to your home page AND inner pages, rather than just your home page.  This tells Google that many of your pages have value and other sites “like” them.

Sites are evaluated monthly

Websites are evaluated every month.  If you make an on-site or off-site SEO change today, it’ll take about a month for Google to recognize it and adjust your rankings accordingly.

What does this mean to me?

• If you’re experimenting with multiple link building services and techniques at the same time, it’s gonna be nearly impossible to know which ones helped and which ones hurt your rankings.  Also, it’s not productive to try a service for 1 week, assume it doesn’t work, and cancel your membership.  Then 3 weeks later you’ll just be surprised to see your rankings change and not attribute it to the service you had canceled.

I stumbled across this site recently and thought it was a pretty clever idea.   YouLikeHits.com allows you to:

• Get Twitter followers
• Get Facebook likes
• Get MySpace followers
• Get StumbleUpon followers
• Get Digg followers
• Get visitors to ANY website

I’ve tried A TON of keyword research tools:  Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai, Word Tracker, Keyword Elite, you name it…I’ve tried ‘em all.

What sets SECockpit apart from its competitors is that it’s ridiculously fast.  Since it’s a web service rather than a local software app, you can run as many queries as you want simultaneously…in fact it can handle 200 fully processed and analyzed keywords per minute.  I’d like to see your current tool do that!

Not only that, but SECockpit uses multiple keyword sources:  Google Adwords, Google Suggest, and Google ‘related search terms’.

Let’s take a look at the SECockpit interface, for this example I used the seed keyword “deals”:

As you can see, it comes packed with tons of useful details for each keyword.  The “Niche” column is the SECockpit evaluation of how “good” the niche is for that keyword.  You can see which domains are available to buy for each keyword, with hyphens and without.  You can see which of the top 10 results are sniper sites or Youtube vids.

And if you double-click on a keyword in the results, you are taken to the top 10 Google results which give you some juicy data such as mozRank, Page Authority, Juice links (count of links that are valuable in determining SE ranking), and a direct link to go to Open Site Explorer.

Pretty slick, eh?

Get SECockpit here.